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196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone
Moss @lemmy.blahaj.zone

What’s Going On With 196, Or, Why We Did What We Did

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
  5. 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.

196 comments

  • 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

    please see the comments for ada's clarification about the moderation workload (tldr is that the mods are not native to blahaj.zone, so reports might be addressed on other instances but not blahaj.zone, frequently leaving ada to deal with them, aggravating their differences in moderation styles)

    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 don't seem to share

    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 blahaj.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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Rmbp

    Is this supposed to be me? Sorry, but I don't write a single word of this.__.

    Not that I disagree, but I have not written or read anything before posting this. But nevertheless I thank you for the Update :D

    The Feddit.de Instance and therefore my feddit.de Account is broken beyond repair. If anyone can just kick him out, this would be really nice since I can't even log in anymore.

  • so this only gets undone once there is another community created on .LBZ that starts getting traction and your new community on .world risks becoming irrelevant, along with your relative power in the situation..

  • 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

    • 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.

    • They just did !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone

  • 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.

  • 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

  • i don't really accept the apology. 196 is not the mod team and you clearly do not have the capacity to maintain a community. please leave and do not come back to LBZ. i enjoying having my funny little people on my phone here and you have not been very funny so kindly stop the car because you are an underage driver. let someone who does not hit curbs or go up a one way street take the wheel thanks also please let the door hit you on the way out

  • My vote is for what I put in the original thread that was ignored multiple times.

    Unlock the community, leave it as is, the problems you are mentioning as major factors in the decision simply do not matter that much to the community.

    If the mod team chooses to leave and moderate somewhere else because they are sick of people assuming moderation actions done by instance admins are because of them, then they can step aside and mod a 196 community wherever they wish.

    However it will be hard or impossible to undo the damage that has been done, with this comment from moss in particular being especially awful. A sentiment like that can’t just be walked back, it speaks to a moderator having little or no respect for the community and not understanding their place in it. The mods contributions are respected & appreciated, but the community is not being respected in turn.

  • lol 🍿 honestly hope the instance just goes back to being a trans instance, hurry up and leave

  • First, I want to thank you for this post and taking accountability for the mistakes made with this.

    I'll also acknowledge that not being able to see who performed moderator actions can create misunderstandings like you describe.

    My own suggestion would be along the following lines:

    1. Reopen this instance's community on an interim basis. I'll acknowledge I don't know what implications this has for the .world community, and how that would need to be managed.
    2. Put a user poll up about whether users want this community to be migrated to .world. Keep it up for a reasonable amount of time (say a week).
    3. Honour the results. If the vote says keep this community here, commit to moderating it here. If there are members of the team who feel they cannot do this, allow them to step down without any flack. You're all volunteers - if it's too much for someone, it's too much. That's fair and doesn't take away from their prior efforts and support.
    4. If the community votes to stay here, work with the blahaj admins again on how to balance the needs of the community v. the fact that the community wants you to use their resources. Yes, I know you have done this already. But two things jump to mind first:
      a) there seems to be a resource problem re: addressing some kinds of complaints/reports in this community in a timely manner. This might be offset by more mods to help out - I know in the wake of this, many have expressed interest in volunteering.
      b) perhaps a compromise can be met re: a very basic identification of where a moderation action came from - a simple tag [A] for admin, [CM] for Community Moderator. This would reduce any confusion as to where the ban came from, and with it the rationale. I'm not suggesting this would resolve all tensions, but may help manage their worst impacts.

    This seems reasonable to me, but I will acknowledge I am not in your position when offering these.

    Edit to acknowledge that while the above was well intended, it looks laughably slow/too little too late now. But I think these might be useful for someone's reference down the road if they consider migration of other particularly large communities down the road, so leaving it here.

    • Put a user poll up about whether users want this community to be migrated to .world. Keep it up for a reasonable amount of time (say a week).

      I don't even get why locking the Blahaj version down should be an option. Mods can discuss opening another version of 196 elsewhere, but locking the current one down? Why?

      • My only thought about locking it down if there's overwhelming support for migrating to .world (which I think is very unlikely) is to give time for people who still wouldn't want to follow the mods to sort out what they want to do, while stemming the flow of stuff while BLZ 196 is unmoderated to reduce load on the admins (which seems to have been one key part of the problems).

        It's a big community, and I could see a jump in malicious activity while a) a new mod team is being sorted out, and b) importantly, people work with the admins to say "K, the old mod team's approach caused some problems for you. As manager of the resource we want to use, how can we manage that better to reopen 196". That and maybe at that point, people staying might prefer a clean break to onehundredninetysix.

        The intent would not to keep 196 locked permanently the way I'm thinking about it unless folks want to change to onehundredninetysix - probably would be like a day or less. I could 100% be making much out of nothing re: transfer to a new mod team, though, particularly given how this went down and the pool of potential moderators that announced interest already.

    • Also appointing a few moderators who are actually on LBZ and active in the community could be helpful.

196 comments