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’m not familiar with the dynamics between LW staff because I’m not a member of LW staff. I don’t know who Ada’s staff are, either. It’s not something I’ve ever had to know to adequately do my job. But I’m also not the owner of 196 and I’m not the one calling the shots. I’m just answering questions and concerns where I can. Moss is the one who knows most about these things.
However, from what Moss shared with us of her correspondence with the LW admins, I have no reason to believe that they would go back on their word when they said we’re allowed to moderate 196 as we always have.
Owning our shortcomings was the very reason we wrote this post. I thought we were pretty thorough, but if there’s something we missed that you’d like us to address, feel free to voice that here.
Would you consider resigning, and transferring the community to the [email protected] mod team?
I don’t own this community, so that’s not my decision to make.
I could step down, though. But honestly, I don’t think you guys have as much beef with me specifically as you probably think you do. I’m not the one who made this decision, or the one who suggested it. If I wanted to, I wouldn’t have any power to stop it. I’m the newest mod and have the least amount of influence here. The biggest role I played in this was agreeing in our group chat, that yes, Ada’s mod actions don’t align with my goals either.
But I’m catching a lot of the heat here because I’m the one who decided to do a LOT of the explaining. (And to be clear, that’s not due to the other mods being lazy. I’m just the one with the most free time, and in some ways, possibly the most patience ;3). I think if y’all want new mods then that’s fine, but I don’t think your beef is with the whole mod team. Lots of us agree that this should have been handled better and that there should have been more transparency. Some of them haven’t even been here for the past few days.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14569956
A big part of that is probably that almost none of the mods listed in the sidebar are active.
There’s not many places to direct the attention atm.
Was the whole mod team involved in these discussions? Was everyone aware of this desire to move? That Lemmy.world was the selected option?
Edit: As a reminder, “the whole mod team is on board” was one of the original notes on the move.
The whole mod team said it sounded like a good idea months ago. What we didn’t approve of was the sudden decision to move at the drop of a hat with no warning.
I’m on record saying I’m in favor of a vote and making it known we were moving way before we were this close to it happening. But I had to take it down because Ada was getting upset over it, and as the newest mod I didn’t want to be the one to be responsible for any ill will.
You didn’t have to take it down. What I got “upset” at isn’t that you told people you were planning on moving. It’s that you told the community you were “working with me” on your planned move. I had a single conversation with moss, in which I told her I would support her if she decided to move, and that was the last I heard of the subject, until your post.
You telling people you were thinking of moving before you moved was a good thing. You planning a move, not communicating with me about it, and then telling people you were working with me is what I took issue with.
Yeah, and that’s understandable. I just didn’t have the full details at the time, but I do understand now.
Communication is definitely something we have to work on. Both between us and you, and between ourselves. Even after this whole mess, I feel like there were things that us mods should have communicated before taking action. This whole ordeal has definitely been a learning experience for us.
This was part of the issue, but overwhelmingly not the issue for the majority of users. This keeps being referenced as “the problem” but really isn’t what people are commenting on. Just saying that because it really comes across like none of the mod team are actually listening.
So still kinda the same take for me. The whole mod team resigning, to me, makes the most sense. Not one mod seems to be replying to the complaints of the community, and is instead continuously replying with what seems like talking points which don’t actually address the concerns.
So, yeah. Whole mod team leaving makes sense to me. Yes, I include you regardless of your tenure.
We know. That’s why we wrote things like:
We addressed a lot of other things in the post, too. If there’s anything we missed, I encourage you to voice it here.
Do you want me to call out the issues with the post line by line? I can, but honestly I’m just going to be repeating a lot of comments made by other folks already.
Whatever you feel hasn’t been addressed, go for it.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. There are 150 comments in this thread, all the issues have been expressed there.
The mods are almost sealioning at this point.
EDIT AT THE TOP: Doing a whole lot of commenting, and a whole lot of not responding to these issues. So I’ll just assume you have no response to any of these, and will stop here. Kthxbye.
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OK, I’m going to start with the quote. Let’s just do that for now.
You’re still not, clearly.
Then .world shouldn’t have been a consideration.
Ah yes, and you shared that communication right? Not that there has been communication, but actually what was said?
First problem - “our community”. You’re all (mods) acting like this is something you own.
Second problem - “how we saw fit”. You (mods) had a problem with what you (mods) called “heavy handed moderation”. This is entirely your (mods) opinion and doesnt match the community’s opinion. This should be yet another point where you (mods) should recognize that none of you are in alignment with the community, and probably should step aside.
Third problem - You (mods) have zero control over the administration and the rules. Lemmy.world has, even very recently put forth (and pulled back, but not removed - its just being reworded) a requirement around engaging with exactly the sort of people everyone is concerned about.
That post from .world should have immediately told you that a community like 196 would not do well there. But you (mods) ignored this based on “assurances”.
What assurances? Let’s be candid here - assurances to you are meaningless. What assurances are you providing the community? “Trust me bro”? How is that an assurance to the community? How did you (another moment of clarity should be here about you not being in alignment with the community) think people would react, knowing what .world and their admins are like?
Like I said, repeating the same stuff that is not the main problem
Which has entirely consisted of “Trust me, we totally talked to the admins, and what we want is what will happen”.
Thats not an assurance to the community. That is about you (mods) being assured that you’ll have control.
One of these things is not like the other…
I mean, you can. Easily. You can all resign.
Soooo many replies went ignored or just gave the same non-answer. I’d start there. Or by just resigning, which is way more efficient tbh.
Would you like me to do the same with the rest of the post, or are you seeing why the non-answer answers being given by the mod team completely miss the point?
Edit: I’ll also comment preemptively on the example of heavy handed moderation.
First off, the example left out a lot of context. Context that is important. Ada, IMHO, made the right call, its the mod team that screwed up there. So calling it heavy handed or “by vibe” is just disparaging nonsense. That moment where people pointed out the example being garbage should really have been another signal to the entire mod team that they aren’t the right fit.
Second, the desire (by the mod team) to move is waaaaayyyyyyy after where communication should have occurred. Asking if people agreed with the choice should have been the first step, because clearly a majority of the community agreed with Ada as well.
So even the idea of discussing a move was so far removed from when conversation should have happened, if only to get some alignment/input from the community, that this should also be a pretty bright lantern light guiding the mod team to resignation.