This was originally posted as a comment response in !asklemmy@lemmy.world.
Back in December, the instance hosting 196 (lemmy.blahaj.zone) announced that, as part of its mission as a trans-friendly space, harassment based on gender or neopronouns would remain prohibited—even if the user in question was suspected of being a troll. Users were asked to disengage, block, and report suspected trolling behavior rather than bring harassment into a community already vulnerable to that kind of bullying.
There was a small backlash to the policy from some users. This led to a number of “toe the line” posts that weren’t outright gender-based harassment but strongly signaled an intent to misgender or harass in the future. Blahaj admins promptly removed all offending comments during this wave of dissent.
Important to note: The majority of the Blahaj and 196 users supported the policy, upvoting and praising the admins for creating a safe space for trans individuals.
By January, the backlash had mostly subsided, and the trolls causing issues had moved on. However, 196 moderator @moss and their team remained unhappy with the policy. They cited “personal differences” and felt Blahaj admins had overstepped by removing comments themselves rather than allowing 196 mods to address users who openly expressed intent to harass others.
Yesterday, @moss and the 196 moderation team enacted a major decision without consulting the community. They locked !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone and instructed users to move to !196@lemmy.world.
This move was extremely unpopular. Many users strongly dislike lemmy.world for various reasons (a complicated topic better unpacked elsewhere). The announcement post was met with widespread backlash, and @moss eventually locked it. In response, a few users created a new community on Blahaj: !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone. The new community quickly grew in size and activity, with most users opting to stay on Blahaj rather than migrate to lemmy.world.
It’s clear @moss and the 196 moderators underestimated the community’s attachment to its home on Blahaj. By attempting to uproot the group without input, they alienated much of the community. As a result, most users have moved to the new Blahaj-hosted community, which has already become the more active space.
TL;DR:
@Moss and the 196 mod team tried to move the community to lemmy.world without consulting anyone. The decision was extremely unpopular, leading to backlash and the creation of a new Blahaj-hosted community that most users now prefer.
Mods surely act like it, that’s reddit modding culture at its core.
Back in my day when the forums were the backbone of online discussion modding was a janitorial job. Spammers, off topic, bad faith behavior got modded.
Reddit style modding is censorship of content and tone so that community is discussing topic with facts and tone that mod approves.
With that said most of fedi subs are modded properly but step into any higher traffic sub lime news and politics and then you are facing censorship.
Agreed!
Edit: Oh, I got so irritated that UM had replied that I didn’t even see he hadn’t replied to me, and got annoyed that I thought he was messaging me from a new account after me telling him I was blocking him.
Whatever. I’m blocking this new account, also. I suspect that the placement of his reply right where I will see it, on the topic of free speech, accidentally from a new account which I haven’t blocked, is not accidental. But I’ll let the moderators decide if that constitutes harassment or not.
Yeah. On Usenet, when spam first started becoming an issue, there were people who were arguing against deleting it, because they didn’t want to step into the territory of having someone standing over the community removing messages. They would rather have the spam than have someone doing that to other people’s content.
On the modern internet, that’s not the answer, as anyone who has tried to use an unmoderated forum will tell you. But obviously also, the answer is also not for the moderators to be the boss of the users, who have to obey them.