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.
All do respect(which is none) this is the second time you have tried to forceably move this community to .world. We are collectively done with this bullshit and just leaving for [email protected] . Thank you for the good year of 2024 with some amazing memes long live onehundredninetysix
I think you should leave this community to a new team and leave for lw ✌️
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.
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.
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.
Translation: “We were scared the majority wouldn’t follow us to Lemmy world unless we pseudo forced them to, and we can’t imagine life without our fiefdom.”
Especially considering the community already fractured with onehindrednintysix being formed
Remember the current Lemmy community was made and populated by people who jumped ship from one site to another due to site drama so we uh, might be really easy to get going.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
I’m already at [email protected] and it’s fun there. Not gonna go to .world
No :)
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.
The community isn’t something that fucking belongs to you.
Still No
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
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.
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.
…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
