I created this post on my local server, calling for what I thought was reasonable action against a self-proclaimed threat to Canada.
Someone in the community disagreed (fine), and reported the post on their hosting instance (lemmy.world), which led to an immediate deletion of the post (on that single instance only).
Think is, I really don’t feel that it was warranted - and neither do most of the community members over on lemmy.ca.
I realize that instances are autonomous, but is there an appeal process to potentially have this reinstated?
As an admin of lemmy.ca I’m also curious what justified removal of this post from your instance, when the community is not hosted or moderated by anyone from lemmy.world.
It makes me deeply uncomfortable to think that outside users are seeing a view of our communities that has been filtered or modified, without having any way to know it is happening.
Edit: I’ve spun out this thread for further discussion, as I think this is an important topic - https://lemmy.ca/post/12845463
Arent federated comments and posts from you instance hosted on each server you federated with? Admins of each individual server have the right to moderate content seen by their users. If they couldn’t remove individual comments or posts, then the only other option they would have if your users are breaking another server’s rules would be to defederate.
In this particular case, I feel like the removal was unjustified.
Yes, but we have a post that is political in nature being removed by admins of the largest instance. If this was child porn I wouldn’t be concerned, but this is on a post that I don’t think even violates lemmy.world rules.
I don’t think instance admins should be actioning reports, unless they are in clear violation of instance rules. Reports should be left to the mods of that community. By actioning on reports like this lemmy.world is effectively acting as a censor, and as the largest instance they control what most lemmy users see. That makes me uncomfortable.
Can’t agree more. All we can do is reduce the user dominance.
This has been an interesting bit of discussion, to say the least. Different instances with different local rules are going to lead to problems like this situation more and more, as lemmy grows in popularity. It’s inevitable, and we’re all going to have to sort it out as the platform matures.
However the more I think about it, the more concerned I am that removing individual posts (or even comments) on a federated instance has the potential to misrepresent communities, through the filter of each instance’s mod/admin biases.
Perhaps a pointer saying “this post was removed on lemmy,world for violating rule (x), and can be viewed on its original instance <link>” would be appropriate. Or alternatively, blocking entire communities with a comparable stub: “lemmy.world has chosen not to federate community@instance.”
Of course in my examples I’m picking on lemmy.world because that’s where this is happening, but the problem and possible solutions are true for all instances.