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.
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.
dbzer0 or shitjustworks would have been way better than world. There’s just way too many assholes on world, and even if you ban everyone who is overtly malicious there’s still going to be a ton of normal users who are bringing a completely different vibe/political direction than the blahaj users (I say, as a feddit.org user).
Surely it doesn’t make any difference unless you’re on an instance that’s defederated from .world? I’ve only just moved off .world but I could already post and comment here?
Only if you think that the instance’s userbase doesn’t matter for any given community.
I thought the point of federation was that it doesn’t matter?
The point of federation is that the means of management is distributed and localized, and anyone (capable of running an instance) can make their own and interact with the other instances.
Locally, administration matters.
For example, I had a .world account. I moved to db0 because .world made it clear their admins were amateur lawyers, db0’s administration style and rules align with me (among other things, but irrelevant here), so I moved.
I could have seen a lot of the same content on .world, but not all (federation with specific instances is optional after all), but the .world admins behavior mattered to me. db0’s approach matters to me, as Ada’s does to the many on lbz.
For me, it was a great decision to leave .world, and I’m quite happy where I am. That, to me, is the point of the fediverse. I can change instances to get away from their administration, and still get all the content.
Hope this made sense and wasn’t just a garbled mess of early morning ADHD.
Yeah I understand the reasons to move due to administration that’s kind of why I moved as well (I disagree with stuff like not degenerating threads etc), I just don’t understand the arguments about the .world user base in general since you don’t get away from them just by moving instance (and I can’t say I ever had any issues with the users anyway)
LBZ has more strict rules about behavior, while Lemmy.world is much more lax (in some cases, in others they take a hard right turn, but mostly irrelevant for this part).
By going to .world, the mods are saying that is the admin level ruleset/moderation they support, specifically because the mod team said they consider Ada to be “heavy handed”.
.world tends to have a lot more of the problematic userbase, in part due to its size.
On LBZ, the users would have the benefit of both moderation by the community mods, as well as the rules of LBZ and its admin team (I’m sure there are folks who help Ada in some way, sorry but I dont know who they are).
On .world, those additional rules/protections are gone, and a recent announcement (which has since been crossed out with a “new announcement clarifying” message) basically said you have to engage with trolls, and its OK for users to be awful. As you can imagine, this didn’t go over well, and yet they are still moving forward just with text edits based on what they’ve said so far.
This is a huge change in rules for the community at large, as well as an increased risk - from appearing in the local feed in addition to all or subscribed - in .world users who are problematic getting involved in discussions on 196. With the change in instance level rules, in combination with the mod team wanting more lax rules about behavior, means more exposure to those problematic folks.
If you’re not on .world, defederating .world remains a possibility. Also, have you never browsed your instance’s local tab?
Honestly no I’ve never browsed local lol, sometimes I browse all but usually just subscribed
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.
my honest opinion on the whole matter, and this is as someone who really doesn’t care either way. You should give up on the community here. I don’t mean that in a mean way, I mean you chose to do a decision that was drastically unfavorable to the majority of the current community on this instance it seems.
Regardless of intentions, your long past the turning point of being able to backtrack on your choice and re-enter the community just reading the comments here tells you that honestly your best bet is probably to just continue with your plan at this point, even if you did decide to unlock the community here it’s clear that you’ve lost all trust in the majority of the users that are still participating on this post, so they’ll just stay in the new community instead of returning.
In the words of Kenny Rogers, You have to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run.
This is a clear “know when to run” instance. There is no favorable outcome for you on this community you won’t gain that trust back and there are far too many people still pissed about this issue, you are better off continuing the plan on LW and just let the people who didn’t agree with it stay on the new community they made (or unlock the old community but you have already been pretty solid on that one)
Thats just my input as a lurking third party.
edit: looks like my feed was outdated, I just got the unlocked post, I still stand firm on my opinion on it though.
edit 2: shouldn’t have second guessed myself, guess I had the name right the first time lmao
That’s not a Johnny Cash song. “The gambler” by Kenny Rogers
I had Kenny Rogers originally, but when i second guessed myself and google searched it both names came up, they both sang it it seems. I used Johnny Cash cause figured the name might be easier to recognize XD I went ahead and changed it back again.
I’m not very involved in the community either, but I would say though that community trust isn’t a binary thing, and all people, even leaders, are allowed to make mistakes. From a pure political perspective, I don’t think there will be enough of a hostile response form the users to start any significant fragmentation of the community, which is the main concern when leaders lose trust from the community.
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
Lemmy.world is a rancid instance, and I won’t be joining you. I trust and respect Ada far more than the mod team here. Historically, you’ve allowed so many bad-faith actors here. I just returned, but I know in the past I saw at least one regular here whose alt was banned for queerphobia. He’d constantly stir the pot, and you did nothing. RIP 196, I guess. You’ll learn why this was a bad decision, mark my words.
There are reasons beehaw defederates from lemmy.world
RIP 196, I guess
Nah the community’s still going: [email protected].
Why do we have to have to move to one with a shitty name, if there’s enough support why couldn’t @[email protected] give us control of this one. That is where all the people and action are already. Why should we have to further fragment.
I asked her about it, and she said that she won’t hijack the community from the existing team, but she’d be willing to point people to a community made alternative if it spins up. Not necessarily the decision i would have made, but i understand and respect it.
I don’t, she shows she doesn’t respect this community by her inaction, and letting them just name squat or worse, possibly wipe out this community and all the posts in it. And for what? Because they’re sticking up for a transphobic asshole who was banned from the instance and recieved automatic community bans from 196 and other communities as a result.
Honestly I expected better.
Thank you very much! I feel joy!
nice. I’m outta here
Yeah lemmy.world is a horrible instance, they protect and unban trolls, transphobes, and even in one case, a person advocating for CSAM legalization WTF? This is a horrible decision and I’ll never stand by them or support them. This destroys any amount of good faith I once had in the team here. I say they should be replaced and we continue here like nothing happened. blahaj.zone is an amazing instance and I for one appreciate them being as harsh on bigots and their apologists as humanly possible.
I intend to migrate to [email protected]
However, in my opinion it’s a shame it had to come to this.
No offense but that community has a horrible name, it is insanely ugly. Shame on Ada for letting this one rot because mods said so.
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
Everyone’s anonymous? Uh yeah sure just because the username isn’t linked to your person doesn’t mean you are anonymous.
And yeah the trust has been eroded, the trust of keeping the community a safe place.
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.
The community isn’t something that fucking belongs to you.
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 [email protected] mods the mods of [email protected] 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.
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.
deleted by creator
Reposting this since you said you were going to answer questions in the [email protected] post but this one is still unanswered:
If the move had nothing to do with pronouns and you’ll continue to enforce rules about neopronouns, how do you feel about one of the LW community team mods making statements like this about them? Do you feel confident that they will always let you enforce neopronoun rules if they decide that it’s hurting LW?
They’re not a LW admin, so they have no influence or control over us there. On top of that, we addressed this in the first question, reasons #1 and #4.
I guess I’m not sure what a “Community Team” member does, then, if they have no control or input on how LW policies are carried out in communities. I can’t find an explanation anywhere here so maybe someone can point me in the right direction.
They’re a mod of /c/lemmyworld, not an admin. And, again, this was addressed in the first question of the FAQ, reasons #1 and #4.
I understand they’re not an admin. In the page I linked you can see they’ve been put in the “Community Team” section. Are you saying that “Community Team” is a convoluted title that the LW admins have chosen to say “person who mods /c/lemmyworld”? Or do they have some other role that I can’t find outlined anywhere? (Which could be on my end, the site I linked doesn’t play well with mobile)
Ohh, dang my bad, I wasn’t sure what you were getting at. I only knew him as the guy that posted the thing that everyone hated but turned out to not be an admin.
I’m…not sure what that means lol. But our agreement with Ruud was that we could moderate our community however we saw fit, so I think it’s a moot point anyways. I have no reason to believe he would go back on his word.
And I’m sorry if I sounded frustrated. I am, honestly, but I didn’t need to direct that at you.
it’s not a good look for you to not know how lemmy.world is ran while simultaneously saying you can’t stay on lemmy.blahaj.zone and are moving to lemmy.world because of how it’s ran. it demonstrates a lack of understanding for the impact of the move, and the potential risks to the community of people you want to force the move on.
you didn’t do your research and it shows. lemmy.world, of the instances mentioned in your post, is possibly the worst instance to move to, especially considering who is drawn to 196 specifically of any lemmy shitpost community. you this whole debacle has put on display a shocking lack of understanding from a mod team of how community building, the lemmy ecosystem, and the fediverse at large work. we don’t need you to be experts on this to talk with us, but we need you to own your shortcomings, which has consistently not happened throughout this journey.
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.
Yeah, I’m not sure what it means either, which means I’m not sure how many red flags the earlier thread I linked should be setting off. A random mod on LW being respectability politics about neopronouns is meh, someone higher up the chain than that and it’s brake pumping time IMO.
Also like, presumably everyone else on LW thought they were allowed to moderate their communities how they saw fit before that announcement, you know? My understanding is the LW admins shelved the policy for retooling, not retirement, so personally it’s not something I would want to chance. I don’t think anyone is purposefully lying to you guys, but I also don’t think they’d make an exception just for 196 to do whatever it wants with any future instance rule changes.
That mod has admin rights. Look at [email protected] for evidence. They took over the community and locked it down, and removed the mods.
Regular users / mods can ask instance admins to do everything you just described on their behalf. And he’s not in the admin list.
Well spotted
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.
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
They just did [email protected]
ik i already subscribed
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
The actions and attitude presented by the mod team are inexcusable. We have already taken our toys and left. It’s time to step down.
