this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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4 users here now
This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions from mod(s).
- Provide the cause of the sanction (e.g. the text of the comment).
- Provide the reason given by the mods for the sanction.
- Don't use private communications to prove your point. We can't verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don't deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don't harass mods or brigade comms. Don't word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin' in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
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To be fair, the voting there is just to probe the waters, the admins still want to take the final decision.
About users (incl. devs) leaving, it's worse in the context:
When r/CTH was banned from Reddit, I thought that it wasn't to blame - it's just that the Reddit admins wanted to throw a bone to the fascists, as CTH was in the same banwave as frensworld and clownworld. I mean, it's spez/kn0thing, we know that "umm, ackshyually, we don't hate you fascists. See? We're also banning some left-wingers! Please stay in Reddit, our dear fascist userbase".
However, if I'm reading those two comments right, that is clearly false. CTH → Hexbear was already tailored to cause trouble to other communities back in Reddit; this tendency only continued in the Fediverse.
And unless it has a target, its users will fight each other, even if they're all leftists and consider each other leftist, so they can't even pretend that they're just dunking libs.
[from the other comment]
The alt-right playbook that you linked mentions it, under "changing the goalposts".
[And before some casual reader tries to distort this into the horseshoe "theory": nope. I'm talking here about rhetoric tactics that you see regardless of political views. It's just that the alt right loves it, and HB happens to love it too.]
It's kind of funny how it remembers me Marx's The 18th Brumaire - specially the first two paragraphs. As if the .ml admin team (and Lemmy devs) were mimicking what Reddit did as trying to create something new, but being bound by the already existing circumstances so they're forced to replicate how the Reddit admin handles users:
...and as a result .ml ends as the farce for Reddit's tragedy.
That kind of voting "strategy" might best be described by the keyword "gamble", as in it could pay off or... it could backfire. This was public. We all saw what they did. They dangled the whittle "vote" in front of their users, then they snatched it away. That's a "power move", as in someone flaunting their dick size just to show off - worse, a tiny one, while daring someone to talk back. The emperor has no clothes, etc. THAT level of insensitivity is on full display.
The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Two lefts do not make a right. 1+1 != 1.9, nor 2.1, but precisely 2, the former two answers revealing how it is possible for both to be incorrect even if in opposite ways - and then other answers such as 2i, e, -100000, and "your mother" are examples of still more ways to be wrong, although oddly enough "two" could be correct, depending on whether the rules are flexible enough to recognize such.
Flipping to lemmy.ml, I have enormous respect for those code developers having offered their skills to release that for the entire world to use. Kudos. But running an instance is a different skillset - and yet, back when other instances were not yet a thing, they offered that too, to help lemmy get off the ground. Kudos again. Though power corrupts, and over time... Anyway, just b/c something started off one way does not mean that it must continue forward indefinitely - the word for that might be "stagnation", or even "inflexibility" to adapt to changing circumstances.
I agree with all of what you said, except how things appear twice. I think rather than people refuse to learn from history, and therefore mandate that it be repeated, far more often than twice. e.g. Rome fell, now USA is the new Rome, and it will fall too, whereforth who will step up to the plate next? (after a few hundred to a thousand years time ofc, to allow time to forget) Humans are so incredibly stoopid - or at least I know that *I* am - and we love to fall in love with ourselves and our latest bright shiny idea, as if it had never been tried before.
Not that I am blaming the founding fathers of the USA - far from it, b/c (1) it was an experiment, and (2) it actually did work out well all across the wide world. However, it was a piss-poor implementation, which if it was to have been considered as worthwhile then steps should therefore have been taken to have made it more robust. But fast-forward to nowadays, facing up against things that it has never really had to contend with before - chief among them a level of foreign aggression that costs the actors so little, yet yields such enormous dividends; but not far behind is the incredible stupidity that already lies within and is totally separate from that, especially seeing as how it predated it by hundreds of years - and I honestly fear that it cannot stand against such an onslaught (especially this 2-pronged assault) for too much longer.
So in my view what we need to do is WAKE UP. A fire is in the building and we should do things about that. Secure our valuables (e.g. children), identify an exit (if there is one), and the like. But then in the face of all of that, to listen to the likes of HBs... wow, just wow, uh... no. I would leave social media altogether rather than put up with the likes of that. Except when I made my account I did not know. And also it took me months to figure out the extent of the problem, e.g. that it includes lemmy.ml too. And also I did not want to simply leave, without telling others first of my findings. And also Kbin had fallen, long may Mbin yet live, but others were rising up to take its place - and while Sublinks seems perpetually not yet ready, PieFed is looking mighty fine these days. I can be free, not just keeping lemmy.ml at arm's length, but fully and entirely free, from all that bullcrap. Though I am certain that it will not be perfect either - it lacks a lot of the polish that Lemmy has for instance, and yet even there it has things that Lemmy does not, e.g. I've asked questions and seen changes made in (not even tens of) mere minutes! Which itself could lead someone to ask... why wasn't it made already?:-P But anyway that's a far cry from begging to be able to defederate from the toxic userbase on lemmy.ml, and a year later we seem further from that goal than ever before - almost as if there is resistance to providing such a feature...
I'll focus on the disagreement, OK?
In all examples provided by Marx, the "farce" was fully aware of the "tragedy". Including the "main character" of the book, Louis Bonaparte - he was Napoleon's nephew, he clearly knew how things went in the French Revolution. And the .ml admins are likely aware of how rules are enforced in Reddit.
So it isn't like people don't learn from history - it's more like they can only replicate it poorly, as it's what gives them some reference, even if the conditions around them change. That also applies to the .ml admins; even if they were the ones implementing modlogs and federation, since their reference is Reddit, I think that they never took into account the contradiction between their opaque rule enforcement and the modlog, or trying to control what a userbase says versus federation.
I have some good news for you: I've seen lots of programmers saying that Python is considerably easier to learn and read code for than Rust is. As such, feature parity and "polish parity" might come sooner than later.
I'm personally hoping that new PieFed instances pop up, and that some Lemmy instances get converted into PieFed instances. I'm also grateful to the Lemmy devs, and I relate to their desire to have an instance where you don't need to struggle every single minute against the same old anti-communist straw men; but they're awful at community building, and yet so many instances are giving .ml a pass because they don't want to hamper Lemmy development. They won't get that pass if PieFed gets stronger, it'll give them two options - improve their community or see .ml shrinking and Lemmy slowly being replaced with PieFed.
Worse than the modlog entries are the direct database manipulations that didn't even show up in the modlog. The Lemmy devs said that it was due to a bug as the new version was coming out and... we all decided to take them at their word, bc what else can/should be done? It is notable then that at least there is transparency enough for entries to make it into the modlog - bc there are other ways.
Absolutely! I've wondered if I should take the time to learn it myself even. I know C++ and Unix, but probably wouldn't have all that much time to volunteer to the project regardless, though you are absolutely right that lowering that barrier should do wonders for such! And even just feature requests and pointing out issues that don't work will help.
I thought similarly about Rust too, but long ago decided that I did not want to have any communication with people who act like that - I've been burned by that before, even learning several new languages (WikiMedia syntax + their odd "template" structure that is a whole other language + Cargo database querying that is yet again distinct, especially as it differs substantially from true SQL), but still walked away from everything bc of the toxicity of the people in charge, e.g. calling a single back-and-forth collaborative edit session an "edit war" and then locking the page. At the end of the day, Lemmy is "theirs" to do with as they please, and that is that. Short of making a fork, or an entirely separate implementation of the ActivityPub protocol, the situation isn't really salvageable.
Also, any instance on the Fediverse needs some work to get it more fully integrated into the wider whole - e.g. apparently nobody on PieFed.social has been a member of this community here that we are talking in for the past couple of months. I have seen similar issues with !justpost@lemmy.world where posts existed on my instance but were all months old. All it takes is one person subscribing, and then about a day for the posts to catch up and sync, but apparently that had only been true in the past and then wasn't any longer, perhaps after some update. Unless something goes wrong - e.g. I made a post from my StarTrek.website account, to a Star Trek community on Lemmy.world, and even two days later it still doesn't know about all the comments and votes yet, though it is known that lately such activities wrt Lemmy.world are getting jammed - and it should be fixed in 0.19.6. So anyway it's not like Lemmy works perfectly and PieFed does not - they both have their issues, many of which are solvable easily by those who know how. Even short of editing the codebase.
Admiral Patrick, who developed Tesseract and admins dubvee.org, has publicly stated wanting to replace the Lemmy backend on his instance with Sublinks, whenever that comes out. However, I haven't even heard of any updates on the project for like half a year. In contrast, when I mentioned some small issues to the PieFed developers, some of those issues were fixed even before someone else told me that it was not currently that way - THAT is a FAST fix! - and some other issues were bumped up to higher in the priority queue. The are active, not only with PixelFed and Loops, but PieFed as well, and it is looking pretty spiffy already. It wouldn't allow me to send messages yet - that's fair I suppose, for a new account to avoid potential for spam - but I see that you have an account there too! If you can still access it, check it out!:-)
Re-reading through some old threads without HBs (my instance does not defederate from them either) or e.g. Cowbee from Lemmy.ml, it makes such a difference! Even the less contentious Lemmy.ml users still have a substantial amount of "snark" to them - no that's not the right word bc I actually like that, but some form of toxicity I mean, like "hey, I'm just asking questions here!" (No, you're really not!), which isn't always obvious to spot immediately, but whenever I do it is virtually always either from someone on HB or Lemmy.ml (or Midwest.social but that's rare enough to not want to block).
I do think a lot of people will end up migrating, either to PieFed or Sublinks. The USA political season is coming up in the next several weeks...