TL;DR: We tried to move the community because of moderatorial concerns, but fumbled how we went about doing so.
First and Foremost:
We’d like to formally apologize for springing this on you all out of nowhere, and for taking so long to respond to the backlash. With retrospect, we understand that we should have notified you all beforehand to create an opportunity to give us feedback. We understand that a lot of respect and trust was lost, and we expect it’ll take a lot of work and a lot of time before we can earn it back, but we would be grateful if y’all gave us that chance.
What happened, and why?
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies. By and large they do a great job and align with us on mod actions, but there have been several cases where we strongly disagreed, and our choices were overruled.
For example, 2 months ago, Kolanaki reached out to us via email and said they were banned from 196 for “playing the victim” and asked us why we banned him, but we didn’t. Moss talked to them and realized that the ban was unjust after reviewing the comment he was banned for. If he had never contacted us, we wouldn’t have known about the ban, and they would have still thought we banned them.
There were a few similar events in a short time frame, leading to a few posts/comments in the community about the heavier modding policies. It’s possible some posts/comments were misunderstood by Ada, or she interpreted things differently than we would have, but it led to some bans that we felt were indeed heavy-handed, and would not violate our rules in even the most uncharitable of interpretations. We have found that this is an ongoing trend when it comes to moderation of our community from the Admins. We oppose this because it leads to many users who otherwise mean well ending up alienated and removed for reasons that are frankly completely unfair. This is, in our opinion, counter to what we set out to build in our community.
It was made clear to us that it was their instance, and that we didn’t have a say in who would be banned and what would be removed. This is, of course, perfectly valid. It’s their instance, therefore it’s up to them to decide what goes, but we no longer wanted to be the ones seen as accountable for moderation actions we have no control over. For this reason, we wanted to transfer out of lemmy.blahaj.zone. As much as we wanted to stay in the LGBTQ instance, we couldn’t come to an agreement with Ada, so we talked to her about transferring out and got her blessing.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand. Besides that, we also didn’t explain why we made the choices we made and only gave very vague answers. We avoided sharing the justification for our actions because we didn’t want to cause drama and/or exacerbate the situation, but this lack of substantiating our actions only caused the situation to worsen.
Going forward (if we may), we won’t make the same mistakes again. From now on, we will attempt to be as transparent as possible.
FAQ
Why we chose lemmy.world
Many people have been asking about why we moved to lemmy.world. It already hosts the majority of large communities and besides this uncomfortable level of centralization, it has also been somewhat controversial as of late. Despite that, we still chose lemmy.world due to the following reasons:
- Moss’s communication with the admins, and their agreement to let us moderate the community as we see fit. Ruud, after looking over our rules, agreed to abstain from taking admin action to curate or otherwise moderate our community, unless absolutely necessary.
- The instance is large enough to support traffic without performance issues (other instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.dbzer0.com would have been fine too), and the instance has a certain degree of guaranteed longevity.
- Moss was given a list that was kindly made by the lemmy.world people as a part of our transfer detailing those who are banned on Blahaj.zone, but not on Lemmy.world, making moderation discrepancies much easier to clean up post-transfer.
- Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
- It was, to the best of our knowledge, the most federated-with instance. We have come to understand that this is not necessarily the case.
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
This is a similar situation with what happened over on Reddit. 196 mods didn’t agree with admins and were eventually replaced (difference here is that we were not forced out, but chose to leave). As Lemmy was a large gathering spot for people fleeing Reddit, we felt it was better to try to keep the community together and move together. Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
What about the possibility of more trolls, neoliberals, bad actors, sealions, and transphobes on Lemmy.world?
Another huge issue was that the mods and the community were not on the same page regarding lemmy.world, their admins, and their policies. We understand the concern about trolls/bad-actors/transphobes, but we feel well-equipped to handle these issues. In addition, we’ve been in contact with the lemmy.world admins for a while now, and they’ve assured us that they’d allow us to moderate our community however we saw fit. All this being said, we still failed to communicate that to the community before taking action, which has undermined any assurances that we have given after the fact. We cannot apologize enough for that.
What about the people who are using instances that are defederated from lemmy.world (e.g. Beehaw)
This is an unfortunate issue that we were not aware of at the time of transfer. We’re not sure what the solution is, but want to make our community as accessible as possible. Community solutions are welcome.
Did you migrate because of X? (addressing speculation)
- We didn’t migrate due to anything related to neopronouns
- We didn’t migrate due to us supposedly not wanting to use blahaj.zone lemmy accounts
- We didn’t migrate due to us having friends who were banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone
- We didn’t migrate due to us wanting to make the space less queer/leftist/etc
- We didn’t migrate due to us getting secretly ousted by the Blahaj admin team
What now?
Well, we’re not sure. We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else. Truth be told, we don’t know what to do. For now, we will leave the comments open to civil community discourse, and choose our course of action from there.
Sincerely, Qaz, Rmbp, Greembow, A_Very_big_Fan, Peachy, and Moss.
I think what brother’s me most here is the entitlement and contempt displayed for your own community. You were told repeatedly that nobody wanted this, and yet you doubled down saying “We know what’s best”. You acted like the community belongs to the moderation team, and they can do with it as they please.
It took a mass exodus for you to finally seriously consider other viewpoints. I don’t think that’s an acceptable way for any moderation team to treat their own community.
That’s not something that can simply be fixed by an apology. It’s something that would require some significant introspection.
I’m not sure if they deleted it or I just can’t find it, but there was a post on the LW destination that said the mods talked about the near-universal, overwhelmingly negative response, and were split 2-2 on what to do: either cancel the plans, or keep going anyway. They only made this post after considering the aforementioned near-universal, overwhelmingly response a tiebreaker.
I think that really encapsulates the problem.
I think yall (the mod team) still misunderstand what you did wrong. You’re just repeating yourself. The problem is not that you failed to announce the migration, it is that you thought it was your choice to make, and that it even was an actionable decision. The fediverse, with each instance having it’s own communities, userbase and set of alliances & blockades, does not afford for unilateral deportation of a community.
Furthermore as moderators of a community you’ll always have to deal with instance admins. The fact you can’t cope with Ada’s safe space policy is a bad look. Quoting one debatable decision as “proof” is not helping. Your perception that you are somehow immune to ever disagreeing lemmy.world’s admins is strange.
Yeah this just about sums up my view of the situation.
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies.
Clearly the community does though.
Which means the community is perfectly happy to continue on blahaj, its you, as the mod team, that aren’t aligning with the community.
As someone who enjoys 196 (but only really participates by voting), I would just say that since you aren’t aligning with the community, this isn’t a community you should be moderating.
Make the !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone mods the mods of !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone and move on.
But the community at large doesn’t know what the moderators knew, so simply stating that the community agreed with the moderation of the admin team, when the community was largely to completely unaware of the differences between the admin- and the mod-team seems unjustified. Or did you know that the admins banned certain users for content that the mod team was fine with?
The issue, to me, seems to be that the community thought the admin- and mod-teams were on the same page, so the mod-team claiming that there have been differences with the admin-team, which prompted this move seemed extremely sussy. I’m not saying that the mod-team handled the situation great, or to be more precise, their move seems to be absolutely terrible, but the community doesn’t know all the facts that lead to that decision.
Irrelevant.
Also…
but the community doesn’t know all the facts that lead to that decision.
And the decision was to go to .world, where recently the admin team decided trolls are to be engaged with, where misogyny, transphobia, etc happens pretty regularly and doesnt “cross the line”, with their reasoning being that the admin team was too heavy handed.
If that doesnt scream “Completely out of sync with the community” to you, I don’t know what would.
No matter how you look at it - the mod team is far, far removed from being on the same page as the community. That makes them the wrong mods for the community.
where recently the admin team decided trolls are to be engaged with, where misogyny, transphobia, etc happens pretty regularly and doesnt “cross the line”
They adressed this in the OP, stating that the .world admin team was contacted prior and was allowing them to keep all their rules. So while .world as an instance may be as bad as you describe it here, the mod-team was planning on upholding the same rules that were upheld by the mod-team on blahaj.
Again, I’m not saying that their decision to move without consulting the community was good, far from it. But firing off straw-man arguments isn’t helping your case.
They adressed this in the OP, stating that the .world admin team was contacted prior and was allowing them to keep all their rules.
“Trust me bro” is worth less than nothing when they dont respect the community enough to communicate.
Nothing about what I said is a straw-man, there are defined differences in admin level moderation which the mod team specifically stated.
So cut the bs about logical fallacies when none are present.
Nothing about what I said is a straw-man, there are defined differences in admin level moderation which the mod team specifically stated.
Yes, there are defined differences. On blahaj, the admins are removing posts and comments that, by the mod-team’s estimation, did not violate 196’ rules. On .world, the admins promised not to.
Yes, there are defined differences. On blahaj, the admins are removing posts and comments that, by the mod-team’s estimation, did not violate 196’ rules. On .world, the admins promised not to.
Yes. Because .world is more tolerant of the things I mentioned.
The mods want more lax admins who let stuff slide. The instance that said “you have to engage with trolls” is the instance they tried to move to.
This ain’t rocket surgery.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand.
No, your major failing isn’t that you didn’t “announce” it, it’s that you didn’t consult your community first. Your actions have demonstrated that you think you own the community, but communities don’t belong to mods.
Moreover you have clearly spelled out that your ideological differences are because you don’t want to “entertain trolls” which i can only assume means you want to ban people whose identities you deem invalid.
Frankly, get off your high horse. 196 isn’t some serfdom. It was a community. You seem to have forgotten that.
The community isn’t something that fucking belongs to you.
I cannot stress enough how untrustworthy any of you moderators are now, because how do any of us know that in a few days or weeks or months you won’t just randomly close the community and decide you’re moving elsewhere. In short, I really don’t care if you continue to move over, or stay on .world, or do anything else, I don’t want any part of your community anymore. And I don’t see how anyone else would either, but that’s entirely their business
to be honest, I never trusted the mod team much for many minor things and now I dont trust u at all for this huge thing that u’ve been hiding for months apparently, if this community is coming back Id personally still prefer a different mod team
We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else.
I guess u could moderate the .world comm for the people that prefer that instance since there seems to be people that do including u, and the people that were going to mod the onehundredninetysix comm would mod this one
i’m from beehaw and i support our decision to defederate from lemmy.world, and honestly, i agree with ada’s moderating decisions. i don’t come to 196 to deal with people “just asking questions” or getting transphobic trolls coming in and CERTAINLY not cis people whining about how they don’t get their good boy ally points
especially if the post about you leaving 196 reports to languish unattended to is accurate (it’s from another user on this post who i can’t see while on beehaw, i’m guessing they’re from a defederated instance. they quoted ada, but i couldn’t find her comment as a source, so i don’t know if it’s real)if that’s real, we barely know what your moderation style is, and i’ve been giving you false credit for ada’s good moderationplease see the comments for ada’s clarification about the moderation workload (tldr is that the mods are not native to blahaj.zone, so reports might be addressed on other instances but not blahaj.zone, frequently leaving ada to deal with them, aggravating their differences in moderation styles)
so we have reason to doubt where your moderating priorities are, you disagree with noted Good Judgement Admin ada, and you unilaterally decided both to move and where to move the community without consulting anyone first
from my vantage, you couldn’t even protect us on world if you wanted to, andit really doesn’t seem like you want to, eitheri think the actual respectful thing to do at this point is to just step down. y’all have disrupted this community enough. there are mods who are interested in, and understand the values of, this community. values that you don’t seem to share
let them take over and have things return to normal. make a /c/196 on world if you want, it sounds like there won’t be a lot of content to moderate anyways
Ada’s comment can be found here
And ya, if it’s true that Ada was the one dealing with the the reports, I’m not really sure what the mod team was even doing (other than making unpopular decisions without community input)
I feel I need to clarify that. I am not saying that the 196 team didn’t moderate. What I’m saying is that because most of their moderators are based on remote instances, due to the way lemmy reports and moderation work, some of the reports fell through the “federation cracks” and didn’t get actioned remotely. And because mostly they appeared to be issues about the community rules rather than instance rules breaking, I would leave them alone. But as a result, they would regularly sit in my reports queue for a day or more, because they don’t go away until someone explicitly actions the report or closes it.
As an admin, I see all reports that cross the instance, and I have to ignore lots of them so that the community mods can deal with them and close them down, because if I close the report, the community mod might not ever see it.
My frustration with 196 is that having their reports hang around for a couple of days was a semi regular thing, which made admining more difficult, because there were always active reports in my notifications that I couldn’t close. I asked for them to put on blahaj based mods, or spin up blahaj alts, which they did, and that improved things, but because they were alts and the majority of the mods were still remote, the problem never entirely went away
tl;dr - This wasn’t a case of 196 mods not moderating. This was an issue with a lack of dedicated blahaj presence creating more workload for me.
Edit - As an aside, this issue also put a bigger spotlight on our moderation differences, because if a remote mod closed a remote report but left the post itself in place, the report on blahaj.zone would stay open, and I would have no idea if a community mod had looked at it. Which is to say, reports for content that didn’t break 196 rules, but did break blahahj.zone instance rules were more likely to come to my attention, because the report would hang around on blahaj.zone for longer. And those removals are the ones that highlighted the difference in moderation values and expectations.
it’s good to have that additional context. it’s interesting to see how federation affects moderation and the issues that can present and how it aggravated the differences in moderation approaches
that said, even rescinding my argument about whether they were moderating, we’re still left with obvious ideological differences that would be bad to disastrous for the community in a place as active and ideologically unaligned as lemmy.world, nevermind the clear contempt that the mod team has shown for the community’s own preferences and safety
as an aside, thank you for the moderation work you do on this instance. while my interpretation that the c/196 mods were doing nothing was incorrect, it seems plain to me that your moderation style was still a good influence on the community (albeit at the cost of extra workload for you). it’s always good to see you around and i appreciate your presence and effort
It feels like a bug that remote mods closing the report doesn’t close the same report on the community’s home instance, but maybe I’m missing something.
It’s definitely not ideal. There should also be a way of making a report for the mods or for the admins
thank you for providing the link to the source
it’s really incredible how the more i learn about the situation, the more the current mod team just seems like a complete mess
I understand two of you were mostly behind the move. Perhaps those two should step down and new mods be brought in. Kind of hard to trust you after all this.
Trust? For an internet forum? About shitposting? Where everyone’s anonymous?
WTF is wrong with people
…what are u trying to say?
I want to abuse people
Usually what people who make a big deal about how community trust shouldn’t matter in anonymous/pseudonymous spaces want. It’s how 8chan came to be
Pseudonymous, not anonymous. And yes, trust is an important factor in any community, including one dedicated to shitposting.
Especially a community that aims to be a safe haven for queer people who may be marginalized elsewhere.
You goofed up and lost the community’s trust, own to it and step down.
Maybe touch some grass too.
i don’t really accept the apology. 196 is not the mod team and you clearly do not have the capacity to maintain a community. please leave and do not come back to LBZ. i enjoying having my funny little people on my phone here and you have not been very funny so kindly stop the car because you are an underage driver. let someone who does not hit curbs or go up a one way street take the wheel thanks also please let the door hit you on the way out
YEAH I THINK MAKING A SEPERATE INSTANCE FOR YOU GUYS AND KEEPING 196 UNTOUCHED WOULD BE NICE CAN WE DO THAT PLEASE
AAAA LOUD WORDS!!
WHAT?
If you don’t want to mod under Ada that’s fine. Nothing is stopping you from making a spinoff community. But this is me calling for your team to step down. Hand over moderatorship. You don’t own 196 and you never did.
My vote is for what I put in the original thread that was ignored multiple times.
Unlock the community, leave it as is, the problems you are mentioning as major factors in the decision simply do not matter that much to the community.
If the mod team chooses to leave and moderate somewhere else because they are sick of people assuming moderation actions done by instance admins are because of them, then they can step aside and mod a 196 community wherever they wish.
However it will be hard or impossible to undo the damage that has been done, with this comment from moss in particular being especially awful. A sentiment like that can’t just be walked back, it speaks to a moderator having little or no respect for the community and not understanding their place in it. The mods contributions are respected & appreciated, but the community is not being respected in turn.
I still don’t understand how you thought this unilateral decision, including squatting on the 196@LBZ name, would be received well in the community. I question the soundness of your judgment.
Hold a vote of no confidence. Let the community you tried to screw over decide if the moderators should stay or resign.
