Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we’ve gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators’ and admins’ comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki’s actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100’s of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don’t immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We’ve also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we’ve provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin’s report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we’ve ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we’ve set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of “do no harm”.
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement “do no harm”.
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
I don’t agree with the outcome of THIS situation, but I DO agree with the idea that mods and admins are not gods on the fediverse. I like the concept of checks and balances, even if I disagree with the ruling. The fact that it’s not a god complex one person rule is better than what reddit has.
That being said, you can be vegan, but give your cat some chicken! Cats LOVE chicken! Why would you want to deprive your cat of what they love? If they were neighborhood cats, they would instinctually be killing birds ALL THE TIME!!! So it’s not YOU killing the chicken. It’s your cat. Don’t like it? Don’t get a cat.
I don’t get a dog. Why? Because I’m never home. That would be unfair for a dog to just NEVER get to go for a walk, just because I’m home like 10 hours a day. And even that is mostly sleeping. Wouldn’t be fair to the dog. Just like it’s not fair to the cat to never have chicken.
Can we not relaunch the argument that turned into a black hole, pulling everyone on Lemmy into a hellish void? Let’s keep the cat diet discussion in c/vegan, c/cats or some other devoted sublemmy.
I don’t agree with the outcome of THIS situation, but I DO agree with the idea that mods and admins are not gods on the fediverse. I like the concept of checks and balances, even if I disagree with the ruling. The fact that it’s not a god complex one person rule is better than what reddit has.
Can you elaborate? I want to understand.
I am not involved in the action above but it seems fair.Cats love their beef food. It’s not normal for cats to eat cows.
Lunatic vegans on lemmy? No way dude
All the vegans I meet in real life are normal ass people.
The reactionary vegan hate is real.
Tldr: we will do more internal talks, was right just needed to tell mods why they were removed, just talk to admins if happens again so we can quietly handle it.
This is what you came up with after all that time?
The site admins are below the org operations team, so you can “go to their boss” / “talk to a manager” if you have a issue you feel is being handled unfairly.
Excellent reply that again answers nothing. Well done PR team
https://fedihosting.foundation/lw-team/
Just search the next higher person and click on him, you will get redirected to their lemmy profile.
So yes only answer is do it quietly next time
Interesting, @[email protected] I didn’t know you were so high in the chart! 😄
Yeah he is one of the oldest i would say, one of the first.
one of the oldest
Damn, rooki taking swings at the higher ups.
Old man up in here!
I just try and keep everything running and everyone as happy as I can ❤️.
I was going, at one point, to be a social worker, in another life 😁.
I also do my best to stand behind both the team and the Fedi as a whole. It’s tough, but worth it heh heh.
good look
There could be a technical fix for this. Lemmy could use a system that requires certain moderator and/or admin actions to require a 2-person authorization, and temporarily put the action in an “under review” state for a set amount of time.
For instance, an admin removing content would replace it with a placeholder for up to 2 days. If another admin accepts the change then the comment is removed. If no other admin responds then the content is put back.
This is pretty much Change Management.
Solid idea. One consequence of this would be the possible delay in removing material that really should be removed as fast as possible, though.
One person would be a good determiner of that.
Which is why the content would get masked until a 2nd person approves or it gets unmasked.
Right, but that content will still exist server side.
Change Management can account for that, but if it’s truely that big of a problem then there might be legal or other compelling reasons to keep the content server side and inaccessible.
More backstage work for admins who are NOT paid. No.
In theory a good idea, but there is lots of content that needs to be gone serverside asap - either because it’s CP, otherwise illegal, spam that clogs down the Fediverse/can even be used to DoS a server,etc.
Illegal things probably need to be retained as evidence. It’s many times illegal to remove evidence if you think it’s possibly relevant.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d consult one about this.
It depends very much on the legislation - in many legislations it is absolutely illegal to retain it.
Anyway, there are more than enough non-evidence class materials that need to be removed asap.
I was just thinking about this: peer review admin actions. A first admin could initiate the action, then the peer review could be assigned randomly to another admin - randomly so that admins can’t create specific cartels to team up on specific topics.
I think a 3 person team is better. 1 mod/admit marks something for moderation. 2 other mods need to agree to mod. If 1 of the mods disagrees, it stays.
This is inspired by true events in September 1983, where a russian command post in charge of their nuclear weapons caught on radar 4 incoming missles, supposedly fired from America. The captain in charge turned his key to fire every nuke they had at America. The second in command turned his key as well. The third in command refused. His logic was if America was going to fire nukes, why fire exactly 4 nukes and only 4 nukes, all targeting the same location? Would it not make sense to deplay thousands if you’re trying for a surprise ambush?
Those nukes that America fired? Clouds. The Earth was at just the right rotation for 30 minutes to confuse the russian radar into interpreting 4 missle shaped clouds as solid objects.
America was almost turned to dust for no reason, 2 weeks before I was born. Because of some happy fluffy white clouds, that even Bob Ross will admit almost DID cause an accident!
So yeah. Maybe we do a 3 mod system.
We’re not dealing with nukes.
But any standard change management process can do that. I don’t think 3 people need to be involved in most matters.
This reads like more misinformation so I had to look it up. I’m seeing that it was one person that made this decision.
I’m replying to someone suggesting that in the future it should be a 2 man process. I’m suggesting it be a 3 man process. Nobody is suggesting this already happened.
I mean it could be granular like with 2 up to all admins.
A slight modification, it could be implemented as a suggested action where the admins (or mods) can ask for a second opinion when they feel it’s appropriate.
That way urgent actions can happen right away, and potentially controversial actions can be discussed. It should solve the problem without forcing a specific workflow
Personally, I like this idea. But it can be equally abused if two admins colluded to agree with each other. But, I think it’s at least better than nothing.
I would imagine this would need to be done at the software level to be most effective. You should request this sort of feature from the Lemmy team to integrate into both the backend and the UI.
If you do create issues for this request, you should post back here (or whatever related community) so people can upvote the issues to show the devs we really want the feature.
Upvoting and commenting for visibility, this is a great idea. Though concur with snooggums below that it would need to be an opt-in option.
You can’t fix people problems with technical solutions. I know tech folk like to think they can, but it really doesn’t work. Sometimes you simple needs some rules, guides, and a good book to slap someone with.
Maybe not fix, but some things can certainly help.
Would be fine as an option that could be enabled, especially for larger communities, but an instance run by a single person wouldn’t be able to host communities if it was a built in requirement for all communities.
Of course.
so this is an endorsement of animal abuse from the admins?
This is an endorsement of freedom of speech even if your ideology disagrees
I was looking for the super hyperbolic nonsense statement, surprised it took me this much scrolling honestly.
Maybe Lemmy is getting better…
I’ve seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don’t get removed. Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
its almost as if like people can make conscious decisions for themselves, yet have to be proper caretakers for animals that can not make such decisions, even if it includes going against the owners inbuilt beliefs, because it is in the best interest of the animal which is reliant wholly upon your care taking.
I’ve seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don’t get removed.
Hunting and Fishing is the circle of life. As long as we do it as humanely as possible it is necessary to feed 8 billion people. In fact in some instances it can be ecologically helpful, like culling invasive species. The same cannot be said for continually feeding an inadequate diet to a living animal.
Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
To me there’s a fine line between discussing “the theoretical possibility” and recommending it to cat owners. Of course it’s theoretically possible, but as far as I can tell it has not been proven in practice yet, and should not be recommended.
Hunting and Fishing is the circle of life. As long as we do it as humanely as possible it is necessary to feed 8 billion people.
We do not need to hunt or fish to feed 8 billion people. In fact overfishing is a big ecological issue. And hunting and fishing are the circle of death, not life, as we don’t need to hunt or fish to survive, assuming you live in a technologically advanced civilization.
I’m not saying all of our current meat and fish systems are perfectly humane and sustainable. I agree a lot needs to be corrected and reduced there. What I am saying is you can’t completely eliminate all animal based sources of food from the planet and expect to feed everyone adequately.
What I am saying is you can’t completely eliminate all animal based sources of food from the planet and expect to feed everyone adequately.
Why not? It’s not like everyone would turn vegan overnight. It would be a gradual change and our food infrastructure would change with it
Well, animal abuse is okay as long as it’s done to an animal you don’t care about. That’s just the circle of life.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm, sorry
Haha sorry, it’s definitely sarcasm. I’m just tired of people who have no idea what they’re talking about using any opportunity to try to dunk on vegans with the same old tired arguments we’ve heard and refuted to deaf ears hundreds of times before. It gets real old.
Hunting and fishing for sustenance could be described as the circle of life. Trophy hunting and catch and release fishing are not. Something something we are not the same meme.
yes, clearly I was talking about for sustenance, hence mentioning “feeding” multiple times. If you want to petition the admins for banning trophy hunting discussion I might be in favor of that.
It is an endorsement of allowing discussion of a controversial topic that didn’t break the posted rules.
Feeding a cat a vegan diet is animal abuse because it requires a workaround for their biology as an obligate carnivore instead of just feeding them what they have evolved to need. If a vegan can’t properly feed a particular pet, they shouldn’t have the pet.
But we should be able to discuss it unless the rules for the community are changed to prohibit that kind of discussion.
How can vegans justify having pets at all?
Even if you hold that opinion, vegans should be allowed to disagree with us and argue why we are wrong
This is where you and I disagree
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this.
most of the research i’ve looked at seems to point out that there are various pitfalls, e.g. just feeding a cat vegetables will result in malnutrition. having synthetic additives for this can be one way to address that problem. just because something is sold as vegan cat food that doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s healthy for the cat, as some of the articles were pointing out that some of the cheaper ones were lacking the right ingredients.
as an example, “my cat now only gets potatoes and apples and nothing else” would be considered animal abuse.
additionally, if moderators were to remove arguments pointing out the risks of e.g. missing nutrients in a civil discussion and leaving the other side that just argues “vegan cat food works” without any arguments as is then we would also consider this animal abuse.
in this specific incident the conversation was certainly not civil, which is unfortunate, as this situation would likely have gone a very different way if it was.
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this
Docking tails, snipping ears, and a bunch of stuff we do to dogs is abuse even if they don’t have health issues down the road.
One issue with feeding cats a vegan diet is that cats hide their pain, so if the diet is causing pain due to a lack of nutrients that don’t have obvious external signs like death, they could be suffering for their entire lives. We don’t have long term studies about other health impacts from a lack of meat, and the primary focus has been keeping them from dying. It should be assumed that there are other negstive side effects we cannot see when at least one missing enzyme kills the cat.
Plus the only possible outcome is that some vegan is able to avoid feeding an obligate carnivore they voluntarily adopted the wrong diet.
I never said that it only requires harm down the road.
Cutting body parts off or even just cutting them without good medical reason (e.g. risk of death without amputation) is of course also animal abuse.
For hiding pain, you’re attacking a strawman, because I already addressed that in my previous comment.
This seems like the wrong post and the wrong community to be restarting this fight.
By this logic, oxygenating a fish tank to provide the fish with oxygen is animal abuse. You are artificially adding the necessary oxygen into the water, after all.
Okay, so this is just factually wrong.
Putting oxygen in a tank is necessary for the health of the fish. Feeding a cat meat is necessary for the health of the cat.
It’s also a false equivalence.
There is no workaround for oxygenating fish tanks; we don’t find something that ‘might work as well as oxygen’ according to poorly done studies. We just give them oxygen, the thing they actually need to live.
I don’t see the falsehood of the equivalence at all. Living things need certain atoms and molecules as inputs. Provide those, and the living thing lives. The rest is just vibes.
The problem here is they need specific molecules. A vegan diet does not give cats those correct necessary molecules.
A century ago you might’ve been right, but not anymore.
Any molecule found in meat can be found or made in other ways if we want. The body is complicated, but not that complicated.
It doesn’t work. No study shows it does, save for a few poorly-done ones paid for by vegan think-tanks, and even those are ambiguous. Maybe one day we will manage it, but right now we can’t.
Oh man, it’s clearly more complicated than you realize.
vaccine denial is also allowed when a sub has no rules against it?
Yes, although should be a rule that prohibits promoting antivaxx misinformation. If communities that discuss medical topics don’t have rules against promoting disinformation, they are not being moderated very well.
Keep in mind there will need to be an opportunity to explain why something is wrong, and that requires explaining what it is.
This looks to be more an endorsement of moderation principles and rules, not determining truth of comments.
For the difficulties in determining what’s true, see the kerfuffle about Media Bias Fact Check.
You obviously did not read or comprehend the post, and are attempting to troll in Bad Faith.
If you had read and comprehended this post, you’d have found that they updated the by-laws to include language to prohibit animal abuse. You’d have also read their reasoning for what they did in their post-mortem to Rooki’s actions.
Do better.
I love the compassionate intervention that allows @[email protected] the opportunity to learn and correct his behaviors and models that level of compassion. Thank you very much! 😊
Me too.
There’s a very simple solution to all of this. Just require the user upload a form showing that their dog or cat consented to being converted to veganism in defiance of their very nature 👍
This thread is not about your vegan vs antivegan-take but how to approach disagreements. In this regard you failed, and luckily, you are not an admin
What do you mean? All I suggested was that disagreements could be settled with an online consent form.
Id say the vegan person talking about how hard it is to make proper and healthy vegan food for cats understand cats better than a person who want to require consent forms from cats
But ye, what do I know. Im not a cat, nor am I a vegan
While we’re at it why not look for a way to force horses to only eat rare steak? I’m sure we can find a healthy way to do it if we try hard enough!
Why on earth would you do that?
I don’t know, same reason you’d force a cat to eat a vegan diet, I suppose.
Some form of mental illness that either makes you incapable of understanding the damage you’re causing to the animal, or that makes you enjoy its suffering. 🤷♂️
you realise that vegans are not force-feeding cats cucumbers and lettuce right?.
It’s scientifically formulated biscuits. That cats enjoy.
Good news, thanks for the open communication.
You’re welcome!✌️❤️ We try and be easy to get a hold of as well.
I have a question: what is the FHF? Searching that acronym without context leads to what appears to be unrelated organizations.
FediHosting Foundation, it’s our parent non profit.
A sensible, compassionate, gracious and humble response? I thought this was the internet?
Yeah, I was as taken by surprise as you. I guess thats one of the reasons I keep using Lemmy after ditching reddit
Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the team (and users) came from Reddit, so feel ya on that.
Try to be as transparent as we can and keep things as healthy as we can for the community.
Vegans causing controversy. This is my complete lack of surprise.
Vegans have their rights to opinions just as you and me. This is not about t vegans vs us, but about how to handle disagreements We never learn if we just sensor everyone we disagree with
sensor
It’s weird how you can not really notice words are homonyms until you see them spelled out…
Who said they don’t? I just find it hilarious that one of said idiotic opinions (cats should be vegan!) is the cause of so much controversy.
Yeah, kinda… no one said that. But hey, haters gotta hate
I mean, it says the post was about cats and vegan diets. But whatever.
Still, when they use words like “meatsplained”, I think vegans can also be haters just as much.
disagreements
So do anti-vax people get their rights to options?
What about religious fundamentalist homeschoolers?
Parents who refuse their children any medical treatment because prayer is enough if you have faith?
Racists?
Where do you draw the line if it’s not animal abuse? Especially presented in a way that someone might fall for the misinformation and not know they’re harming their pet?
Right… where do you draw the line? You are straw-maning a lot here, as the person sensored wasnt an anti vaxer, religious fundamentalist, opponent of medicine, racist or even promoting denying cats meat without careful consideration
But ye, you’,d probably sensor me too, as Im against racism. Im pro choice. Im against capitalism. Im post colonialist. Im pro trans rights. I’m an intersectional feminost.I think every person no matter skin colour, gender, identity or background should have access to free public health care. Hell, I don’t even want people who got rich parents to get access to superior health care as we as a society should give everyone proper health care
So keep on straw manning, as you probably want to sensor me too
This is not a productive comment. It’s probably best to discuss the pros and cons of veganism and it’s followers somewhere else.
tbf, pwning vegans is one of the internet’s most time-honored traditions. Up there with harassing women.
But yeah, you’re right.
What if they’re American vegans who use the imperial system of measurement, don’t own a bidet, and microwave their water for tea? Should I break out the cross and hammer?
Ok, metric system, is better. As is having a proper kettle. Microwaving water is only ok if the water contains ramen 🍜.
Hmmm. Do they use Apple products? That one seems to be a pitchfork target too.
Do they do crossfit? Are they an Arch Linux user?
Some are vegetarians that use Ubuntu and do weigh lifting… 😉
It’s a joke.
Using the Hippocratic oath as a guide is stupid. It only applies to medical personnel that take the oath, and medical personnel haven’t taken that oath since at least the 60s because it actually has a lot of unethical shit incompatible with modern morality. For example, the original Hippocratic oath is against abortion. Does that mean that Lemmy is anti-abortion now? It also forbids surgery for kidney stones, are the admins certified to make this kind of medical decisions.
Just write or choose a good ethical framework that is actually relevant for the management of online communities. There’s better, more modern shit out there that also includes the principle of do no harm. Lemmy.World is handled by amateurs.
Just write or choose a good ethical framework that is actually relevant for the management of online communities. There’s better, more modern shit out there that also includes the principle of do no harm.
You know what would be helpful here? Actually naming and/or linking to some of these better frameworks you think they should consider using.
