Edit: @[email protected] Contacted the moderator who did it on my behalf who admitted that this was a mistake, he sends his apologies. This incident though does highlight though the need for ban notifications as well as the need for a modmail system to contact community and site moderators.
I have left the post up with the original contents bellow as I feel it would be wrong to delete the post and rob people of the valuable information it contains, both in the post itself and in the comment section.
I messaged a mod from the community, not sure if that was the one who did it but this was weird. Not sure if it's power-tripping probably a mistake but it's certainly weird and seems like a knee jerk reaction since I didn't have activity in those last 10 days (I checked for votes too). Also no other bans in the modlog for "sock puppet account" so I don't even know why I would be singled out.
Why would someone think I was a sock puppet account? Because I have multiple accounts on different instances? Really weird...
Account is @[email protected], I didn't post from that account since I try to keep each account on each separate instance (helps prevent accidental vote manipulation).
Lemmy really needs a modmail function. Playing mod roulette when asking questions is a fucking pain.
I agree, this is really stupid having to message mods individually. @[email protected] (maybe it was nutomic, I don't really remember right now) says it's because they don't want Lemmy to be a messaging platform, that mods should use external tools. I disagree. We need modmail and adminmail functions native to Lemmy, not needing to use funky bots or external tools.
We also need for bans to notify the people they're given to, otherwise it's as bad as shadowbans. I could've probably reached out about this days ago but I didn't even know it had happened, I don't look myself up in the modlog, I was looking to see if an unrelated incident had been actioned. Who knows when I would've found out if I hadn't been combing the modlog, weeks, months, would I have ever?
Bans do notify, I believe, if you're on the same instance as the community.
I don't think so, my account and the community in question are both on Lemmy.world and I never got any ban notification.
Edit, nope, doesn't notify. Just made a community on sh.itjust.works and banned my account there. The ban is shown in the sidebar but it doesn't give a notification when it happens, only indication when it is active.
Running as an admin on another platform, having a separate communication medium is extremely important.
I'd back them on this, just on good practices basis.
I mean I don't think it's bad to have alternate platforms to reach out to people on, like having a Matrix room and a matrix account. But I do think that since the idea and spirit of Lemmy is to have many people host their own community instances, or even their own personal instances. That there needs to be some built-in tools for modmail and the like for those who would be more considered noobs in platform hosting. While there are many bigger instances which have set up these systems, there are also many that have not, and that complicates reaching admin teams when they need to be reached. Also for community mods, they can't be expected to host their own email modmail system for their communities, especially if they don't own the server.
That's why Modmail is important, not for use instead of the other tools but in addition to them. After all if you have modmail and other tools it's a redundancy, if you don't have modmail or other tools it's a big mess like what we have now.
I might work on this. My implementation would be a simple backend route that simply messages all of the mods in a community (maybe with a [modmail] prefix as an indicator) Should be fairly simple. Like a bulk PM.
That approach seems ineffective to me, you'd end up with situations where every mod wastes time responding to the same thing or where no mod responds at all because they assume someone else will handle it.
Imo a better starting point is a hidden text post which notifies mods of a community.
Yeah, but that increases the complexity. That was my first idea. If it is going to be more complex, then we can make a dedicated modmail page for the mods in a community. We possibly could reuse code from the report functionality. Actually, I'm sure the report system could be readjusted to just be a text from a user. The resolve function is perfect for mod assignments. Then the conversation between the modmail user and the mod can continue in the PMs.
edit: made a feature request regarding this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5110
Modmail is much more of a gamble because you don't know if you potentially get the abusive mod on the other end, claiming to speak for the whole team.
Back on Reddit, the whole team saw modmail, even if another mod already responded to it. Also, I think the mod responses were visible to other mods.
I guess that says a lot about the quality of Reddit mods then.
It used to be like that, but now a single reddit mod can archive any modmail, which generally prevents other mods from seeing it.
Maybe unlike Reddit don't allow Mods to hide their responses to the user. That way if they are abusive or unfair user can take that and go snitch to the admins.
It should connect you to whoever took the action. If you have relevant discussion or protest or clarification you should be able to get straight to the source.
If you get banned from an instance, this won’t help. They delete the account outright and all its posts and founded communities.