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.
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why not open the original blahaj zone 196, and let ada appoint new mods? if yall want to move and have your heart set on that, thats fine, but its clear that there are many people who would lose access to their favorite community if the original 196 remains locked. having multiple instances of the same community is by no means a bad thing, it simply gives more reach for our communities, and more options for every user.
the whole point of the fediverse is that us users can make experiences we like for eachother. its very clear that many people like the way things are, yall dont have to, but we do. its a community because of everybody who participates, lets try and build communities where our queer and trans friends can feel safe and at home. nothing is lost if we have two communities, only gained. let the nature of the fediverse and federation decide how things play out, not a small group of moderators making unilateral decisions for everybody.
having multiple instances of the same community is by no means a bad thing
also theres already different 196s through the internet like on reddit, tumblr, here, etc all with their own differences and I think thats pretty cool :3
Re: let Ada appoint new mods
Because the problem was the admins, not the mods. Ada was banning users without telling the mods. Read the post linked that got a ban.
But the community doesn’t have a problem with the admin, the mods have a problem.
And instead of leaving, they thought they could take the whole community with them without asking
Ada was banning users without telling the mods.
I was banning users from the whole instance, not specifically from 196. Instance bans doesn’t get pre-approved by community mods. Which is how every admin on every lemmy instance works, including lemmy.world.
Also just for the record. I think Kolanki deserved it for being an ass and playing the victim. You absolutely need to earn allyship, you can’t just self-proclaim to be an Ally when you don’t actually support queer people in any way.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Yes I would’ve banned him if I were in Ada’s position too.
no need to ping me. I disagree.
I would probably also consider this whole fiasco and pushback against Kolanki’s very justified ban an act of bigot apologia, something else that is utterly unacceptable.
that’s ridiculous
likewise.
this is a quote from ada
“I have asked 196 for years now to have an active blahaj.zone mod so that someone can deal with the blahaj.zone reports that constantly come through and build up, but still, the best we got were mods with alt accounts that get checked every couple of days, leaving me to deal with the build up of reports on 196. Sometimes they would hang around there for days while I waited for a 196 mod to log in and look at them. And because you don’t like the way I deal with them, you drag me over the coals for my moderation style, despite no one from 196 stepping up to deal with those reports on a regular basis.”
the issue is not ada banning users without telling mods, it was mods not doing their job and ada stepping in to take action when no one else would.
i read the post that was used as an example of adas supposed overreach, but that commenter was basically saying that cis people cant be allys because trans people arent nice enough to them, reeks of transphobia to me.
There are considering unlocking it: https://lemmy.world/comment/14570102
Thanks for the info. When I got online today, I was very confused at what had gone down; I appreciate people such as yourself who have made it easier to follow current events in this tiny corner of the internet
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
In an unrelated note, I still don’t know what 196 means and at this point I’m afraid to ask.
From what I understand, back on Reddit it was a subreddit that had only 1 rule: If you found your way to that subreddit somehow, you had to post something before you left. A lot of people titled their post “rule” or included the word “rule” for that reason.
As for why 196, i believe that was the dorm room number of the founder of that subreddit. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.
This is correct, but the original was 195. They closed it I think either because it got bigger than they intended or because they were graduating or something, so the successor community 196 was made.
Start your own community. Be original
?we did? for both of these communities??
I thought Ada added you as a mod to this comm well after it’s creation?
not really. it had existed for a couple weeks unmoderated. no banner, icon, whatever
They mean instance
ohhhh
lmfao at the people going
the community doesn’t belong to you!!
then step the fuck up and be a moderator or open your own /c/. stop whining to the people doing free labor for you. on a meme board. “lost the community’s trust” lmaooo
Sorry, I think there’s a bit of miscommunication here. I’m one of the people who made that comment and I meant community in the people sense, and not in the subreddit sense. They can take their subreddit and move it, shred it, burn it, paint it blue, whatever. The point is, they seem to think of the people using the space as something that belongs to them, and that they can just take those people wherever they please. In reality, they have to rely on people following them, they can’t just pack them up and move them, and it’s very apparent that it’s a very unpopular decision and clear that no one is going to follow them to world.
I’m just upset at the arrogance of them pretending they’re doing this for the good of the users when they asked no one. What makes a community great is the people in it, not the people “running” it (using the term loosely, as them actually having to do things is the reason they wanted to move). If they didn’t like it, they could’ve just passed it off to other people, but instead decided to try to pack us into a suitcase and leave.
wasn’t vagueposting about you, saw the same comment coming from a few accounts
also mods can pretend they “own” or control a community all they want, but at the end of the day all they control is a board. people will just move wherever they please, as demonstrated by /c/onehundredninetysix and [gestures] everyone in this thread.
Yeah I edited it to change my wording after I posted cause I thought to myself “how fucking full of myself do I have to be to assume they’re talking about me, I bet loads of people are saying that” lol
ah no worries
They just did [email protected]
yeah i already subscribed
I’m already at [email protected] and it’s fun there. Not gonna go to .world
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 moderation
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, and it really doesn’t seem like you want to, either
i 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 obviously lack
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 blahah.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
Thank you for clarifying.
Oh no blaze you got banned ;(
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
You goofed up and lost the community’s trust, own to it and step down.
Maybe touch some grass too.
No :)
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Still No
What is a sealion in this context?
What about the possibility of more trolls, neoliberals, bad actors, sealions, and transphobes on Lemmy.world?
A sealion is a type of troll who will try to “debate” you simply to derail a conversation and/or wind you up. https://wondermark.com/c/1062 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
It is closely related to JAQing off. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Asking_Questions
Ahh thx, seen this many times in the wild
Yup. They’re very dangerous and lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemm.ee are the three biggest hives for them. I get the impression that Ruud, thedude, and sunaurus aren’t themselves nazis, supportive of nazis, or even all that conservative, but all of them demonstrate a lack of understanding in running their instances of the realities of how a punk bar becomes a nazi bar. I will give thedude and sunaurus credit for demonstrating an ability to learn, meanwhile, Ruud has really only shown me an ability to make small adjustments to avoid consequence, which in a lot of ways, even if I think lemmy.world is a better instance overall than lemm.ee, is worse. I feel like a can trust sunaurus to conduct himself a particular way, and for thedude to listen, grow, and develop, but Ruud seems to always be waffling. I never know what lemmy.world, its users, or its communities are going to be like in 1, 3, 4, 6, or 12 months. I don’t know how the old mods of 196 are unaware of this, but also positive that they need to move instance, and that the best instance is that one.
It all leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even worse than the taste of this Liquid Death Dead Billionaire mixed with Liquid Death Lemon Lime electrolyte powder.
Any specific issues with Lemm.ee and SJW? I just know about [email protected] and [email protected]
sh.itjust.works is much improved, but their agora system can leave the instance dangerously non-responsive until all the protocols are followed. my beef (though not even really, they like their way of doing things, and that’s fine) with lemm.ee is that they tend to align with Free Speech Absolutists too much on what’s acceptable behavior. in other words lemm.ee is a favorite place for sealions because lemm.ee tends to leave blocking and curating to an individual level.
Got it. Yes, I now usually recommend sopuli.xyz for a European instance, they defederate more
sopuli was the first instance i ever tried to join. it’s currently probably the easiest to recommend general purpose instance
I refuse to believe that six individuals can be so enormously out of touch with the community they (used to) mod… what’s the real story?
so this only gets undone once there is another community created on .LBZ that starts getting traction and your new community on .world risks becoming irrelevant, along with your relative power in the situation…
