Tl;dr:

• these are old events, 9 months ago.
• we have since then mostly moved on, but I still thought it could be interesting to document those in this community
• the power trip was a single mod not wanting to discuss how a community should be run and banning people wanting to discuss it
• the new communities we created following this power trip ([email protected] and [email protected]) are now more active than the initial one

Hello everyone,

I added the summary of the event in the tl;dr above. If you are here, you probably want to know the details of what happened.

Starting point

As you may remember, there used to be a movie focused instance called lemmy.film. Following its shutdown, a few users were looking for a new movies and TV shows community that would not be on Lemmy.world (if you want to know why some people are against overcentralization on Lemmy.world, you can have a look here: https://lemm.ee/post/30444527 and https://feddit.uk/post/18336398 )

While I was contacting the lemm.ee admins to become mod of the at the time abandoned [email protected], another mod (I'll just call them "The mod" in this thread) created [email protected]. We contacted the other people who were on the old lemmy.film communities and started posting.

I posted a lot over there, if you sort by Old, you'll see a lot of my posts from back then: https://lemm.ee/c/moviesandtv?dataType=Post&sort=Old

• https://files.catbox.moe/vrnv1t.png

I was also trying to set up discussion threads as they were things who were missing on Lemmy at the time, and a lot of people were complaining about that

• https://files.catbox.moe/75zkck.png

I also started asking for a weekly thread "What have you been watching": https://lemm.ee/post/13386100 which was denied. It wasn't a big deal for me, I was mostly focused on growing the community, I assumed that we could revisit that topic later. That was on 31 October 2023.

Success for the community

12 November, we celebrate our 300 subs: https://lemm.ee/post/14621123

17 November, I start a weekly thread: https://lemm.ee/post/15176837. 7 comments, reasonable success for a first.

26 November, I am appointed as mod: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863, and start pinning the weekly threads.

4 December, I am removed as mod. I ask the mod to make me mod again (purely because it's easier to pin threads), they never answer.

10 December, I open another thread on how to handle movie discussions: https://lemm.ee/post/17546624

I let it go for 6 weeks, I keep posting, after all, this is more or less okay. By then, the community has around 1100 subscribers.

The power trip

30 January, I open a thread to discuss with people in the community how they wanted to handle movie reviews:

• https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/dc0a56ca-bcca-466b-b351-8815c8ab34c9.png
• https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863

The post get removed

I open another thread "Are we not allowed to discuss the way this community is managed?"

• https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/c1c8fa89-8cad-4914-aec0-c2c30ab70405.jpeg

I get banned

I use an alt to comment

Hello, As you banned my other account, I am now commenting with this one. I'm not going to comment on this that much, the modlog is public, people interested can have a look at make their own opinions. For history, the two removed posts: (screenshots) I guess we can just conclude that we disagree on how to manage this kind of communities, which is mostly fine, that's what Lemmy is about after all: freedom. I'll probably contact the people interested in review threads (and there seems to be a few, based on the removed threads and the 200 upvotes on the other post) and see it we can offer an alternative for people looking for a more structured community. Good luck

Comments gets removed: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863

The mod then posts how they want to address the community issues: https://lemm.ee/post/22459747

My alt gets banned.

Please not that those are permabans. Up to this day, I am still banned on those two accounts from that community.

The aftermath

Let's be honest here, I was a bit annoyed. I had been actively posting to a community, helping building it from scratch from months, to get banned just for asking how we could manage this community better.

I reached out to sunaurus, the lemm.ee main admin, who told me that he couldn't do anything, as his admin policy was to not interfere with mod decisions. It's a fair policy that I could understand (even though I was still annoyed). They made me mod of [email protected], and I thought I would take it from there.

I built [email protected] with the same energy I had put in the previous community. I found other people who had seen the drama happening on the other side and wanted to join forces in building another community. I appointed all of them as mods, because why not.

Over time, our community became more and more popular, and now has 2.97k monthly active users, while [email protected] has 1.52k

The mod had promised to add other mods to the community. They did for 4 months (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863) but then removed them in June 2024.

In the meantime, they also banned another user in April 2024 for similar reasons to the ones used for me: https://lemm.ee/post/30754133

They also removed the AMA we organized in May 2024 on [email protected] (https://lemm.ee/post/31335226) because "Unvarified AMA not organized by this community - seems like spam" (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863)

More recently, we started a [email protected] community, which now has 2.35k monthly active users.

That's it.