moss: “we don’t want to moderate under Ada”
us: “…. okay? then quit. there are plenty of us who will gladly take over. :)”
moss: “NO NO NOT LIKE THAT”
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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the mod aint wrong to not want to work under Ada and the community aint wrong for telling the mod to piss off, so the mod got to go imho
It would have been so easy for them to make some kind of thread or poll "what do you guys think about moving instances" and they'd have seen immediately how unpopular it was, and could have just said "alright fair enough then we stay".
I've now probably read more posts about 196 on here than I've read posts on 196.
Is it just me, or is there seemingly always some massively petty drama happening somewhere in the fediverse that people just can't help but whinge about? I swear it's like 50% of the All feed sometimes 😂
Open things come with open drama. It's honestly fun to me, it's my own very niche drama show
If there's more than one person, there's drama brewing. I never check the All feed and yet can always find something. On this occasion I did a meme, but normally, I dodge that shit like Neo.
I'm just not really getting all the hate hate. These people started a community or worked their way into a mod spot. They had a specific set of rules for the community that was posted and reasonably fair. Their community got popular. They realized their site admin was modding their community according to rules that they didn't want to also enforce. They tried to move the community to a better fit instance as non-dramatically as they knew how.
That's all perfectly reasonable to me. Clearly they did a shit job at doing it non dramatically but they're communicating and adjusting their position to try and accommodate others and that alone should buy them a little good will. They are trying to figure out what to do, everyone is trying to figure out what to do. What's with all the hate?
Big detail you missed: the mods did not have accounts in blaj so the reports arrived pretty late. According to the admin there were several instances where there were days without anyone checking those reports, so they did to the best of their ability. This is not about the admin sniping reports but about being fed up of the big pile of reports no one was checking.
The admin would not have moderated the site if the actual mods did do their job and moderated it on time.
From what I’ve seen it appears that (at least one of) the mods claim to “own” the community - which is a disturbing way of thinking about moderation, in my opinion.
I mean one of the things that I hated most about Reddit in my final days was that the admins removed and replaced mods that purposefully closed in protest.
If someone starts a sub they should be allowed to close and nuke it at will. If someone wants it back enough then they can make a clone.
I don’t disagree with your first paragraph but partly do with the second.
If it’s a unique channel-type community you started, produce most of the content for and actively moderate quickly and consistently then, for sure, you should have almost complete control… but 196 is/was none of those things.
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It's like, imagine you’re renting a house with a few people and one of the people none of the housemates really like (they don’t follow the house rules everyone has agreed on) marches in and announces “We all, as a group, are moving to Florida!” And then moves out and takes the refrigerator and expects you to follow. No thanks, good riddance, we’re getting a new fridge and a better housemate.
They can do whatever they want with the space, paint it blue, burn it, close it, whatever. They shouldn't expect people to follow them.
I think this post and the reply highlight the tricky waters we are trying to navigate here in the Fediverse.
I've moderated web forums since there was a Web and usually, the final call is with whoever is paying the bills. Here that is more complicated because, although this instance is fully-funded by the users and I consider myself largely a caretaker in my Admin role (and, by extension, Mods don't "own" their communities they are looking after them for all of us), my name (and @[email protected]') is above the door and we do have legal responsibilities based on the laws in the jurisdictions we operate in.
On the other hand we have the ethos that came over from Reddit, that Mods have some degree if ownership over the communities and some instances tend to operate with that idea, to the point it can be difficult to get new Mode appointed if others have gone AWOL, leading to people starting duplicate communities on the same instance.
Where these two ways of thinking clash you can get some degree of drama, as we are seeing here. Ada and her team take a strong line on certain things, as you'd expect from their instance but the 196 Mods didn't appreciate what they see as interference in the running if "their" community.
This would be just another day in the Fediverse and an example of why it is wise to have a word with an Admin on an instance before starting what might be a large, potentially controversial, community in order to ensure the Admins and Mods are on the same page.
Nah, it's one of the use cases for sites/services like reddit and lemmy.
A way to have a forum for your specific interest that you can build into the kind of community you want.
The barrier to hosting a standalone forum is very high. Prohibitively so. The time, the money, the level of skill needed.
Reddit, for a long time, treated subs exactly like that. It hosted your forum, and as long as you didn't do illegal shit, they would leave you alone. You owned it as much as you can own anything on someone else's hardware.
Lemmy is entirely a clone of reddit based in a reaction to reddit stopping that way of doing things.
The key to lemmy though, is that instances are individual reddits. You host the instance, you decide how "subs" are allowed to function. Some instances have a looser way of doing things, others are more hands on.
But, really, a moderator that creates a community should be as close to the owner of the community as you can get when it's hosted on someone else's hardware. You can try a fully democratic community, and they can work. But they don't work better than what amounts to a dictatorship model. It's just that it takes a higher number of people being jerks to fuck up a community when it's democratic. Organization by a panel is slower to adapt, and also more open to disruption because of that.
It's all about the benefits and drawbacks.
All of that is still trumped by the fact that whoever literally owns the instance can nuke, take over, ban, whatever any community or users. So it isn't like you can escape ownership without making a formally run instance with a legally binding structure. Without that, you still have to hope that the owner doesn't go crazy.
As I’ve mentioned somewhere else I’d take all that in to consideration if it was a more niche sub - but it isn’t. It very much seems to be that a already existing community found its way to Blahaj where (almost) all of the contributors were happy. Then some mods arbitrarily decided that they didn’t like the instance and moved to… .world, of all places. Back towards centralisation and the possible looming spectre of interacting with meta users too.
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You're overlooking that the users don't want to move. The mods seem to think that they're the reason we use 196 and that they can just pack us into a suitcase and take us wherever they like, when the fact is we use blahaj zone for a reason and they can't take us anywhere. They're perfectly free to close the sub and make a new one elsewhere, but no one's going to follow them.
It's like, imagine you're renting a house with a few people and one of the people none of the housemates really like (they don't follow the house rules everyone has agreed on) marches in and announces "We all, as a group, are moving to Florida!" And then moves out and takes the refrigerator and expects you to follow. No thanks, good riddance, we're getting a new fridge and a better housemate.
I understand I'm being a pedant but it sounds more similar to a landlord telling their tenants that the house being rented is legally being moved across state borders. The landlord had house rules under the umbrella of state law and wanted a new umbrella. Tenants are saying "this state is fine and, fuck off, we brought all the furniture in this house."
If you want to be pedantic, the landlord is the admin and the house rules have been set by them. The only power the mod housemate has is ownership of something everybody uses that's replaceable. We're not going to Florida to follow the fridge.
I was wondering why this reply seemed so weird to me before realizing it was ultimately just saying, "but actually, what I originally said."
I also didn't explain why I thought my pedantic answer seemed more appropriate. I will do so here:
The instance admins are envisioned as [US] states because they hold general sway over a number of communities, in this metaphor "properties". They have control, independent from over adjacent "states". Community mods mirror "landlords" in that they own a "property"(community) and impose specific guidelines about how users, in this metaphor "tenants", interact with the "property". The "state"(instance) can arbitrate during disputes and generally won't allow a "property" to apply guidelines that break their state laws.
Of course, the "tenants" are providing all the value. The "landlords" can also be replaced without much concern to the "tenants" unless the new landlord has new rules about interactions with the "property." If the "landlord" has rules that are too annoying or even closes the "property", the "tenants" might be annoyed but they can take all their stuff with them to a new "property" with different "landlords." Maybe even move to a place in a new "state."
If the guy with fridge says "no more fridge", all the stuff in the house doesn't get locked down.
The actual tenant here would be the admin. They own the house and don't want to get involved in the housemates internal discussions
"as they knew how" is carrying a lot of weight there. Just reading through the responses to https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20937206, people were very incensed, and as people are saying here the mods responses are only making the already tense situation far worse.
I think the problem was the fact that they blocked the "old" community, despite a lot of people coming forward to actually keep the "old" community alive.
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All I've seen is "differences in opinion" but no one actually saying what they disagree over? Seems like a lot of drama over nothing from my perspective?
I think the reasoning for this is that ultimately it's not relevant - the mods don't want to point fingers at the admin claiming bad behavior, they just don't want their community moderated in a certain way and let the admin continue doing what they're doing elsewhere. From that point of view, bringing up specific disagreements would only stir up unnecessary drama to a topic that's basically already resolved, detracting from the real issue at hand of how to move forward.
This is heresay from another thread on the topic, but I’ll repeat it here:
The 196 mods were from the lemmy.world instance despite 196 being hosted on blahaj.zone, resulting in delays of moderation actions. Blahaj.zone admins stepped in to pick up the slack, but the mods didn’t figured a better solution would be to just move it to lemmy.world, but apparently some instances are federated with blahaj but not world, or had other reasons to not want it to move, causing drama…
Sometimes, users make comments and posts that are tricky to moderate. In those situations, it appears the 196 mods wanted to be a bit more lenient, while the admin wanted to be a bit more strict in terms of removing that content. It's not one specific thing, it seems like more of an accumulation of small decisions that built up and caused the mod team to make a rash decision.
Ada does not accept sealioning and "Just asking questions"-types in the very trans-friendly space on blahaj.zone, which doesn't seem to be an issue for the mod team (showing how much they are out of touch - moving 196 to .world is a bad move, because such user conduct is more acceptable on .world). Also, it seems that the decision wasn't "rash" - A commenter in the "what went wrong"-post remembered that a mod off-handedly wrote that they were thinking about moving to .world about a month ago (and got pushback even back then). Also, trying that move without even consulting your community once is either pretty bold or pretty stupid, depending on viewpoint.
I have absolutely no problem with Ada, she has a lot of experience moderating around LGBTQ issues and she seems to do a fine job.
But that doesn't negate the fact that it was a difference of opinion between the community mods and the admin as to how the community should be moderated. There are certain communities on my server where I have removed comments and the mods have been upset about it and requested that I give them space to moderate their communities. It's a gray area and requires compromise at times.
If the moderators had done their job in the response time that is appropriate for the protection of the community and to the standards of the site admin, who picked up the slack (since it's their hardware and their legal risk, it's pretty obvious that admins have the last say), and had worked from local accounts to avoid federation issues that were brought up, there would be no need for a move at all. so there is no "gray area" - the mods behind the move did not want to do the "work" of keeping a second browser with their local accounts open and check them regularly.
None of this excuses the way the responsible mods seem to think of their community - they are not cattle to be driven over to another ranch, it is not in their rights to uproot a community againt their will without communication.
The bigger issue was that since the mods were from world, reports were federated late and acculated. Mods were asked to create blaj accounts to actually moderate the site, but they used them like once a day and reports still accumulated. This is why the admin/ada started checking the reports, because no one was doing it.
So moss didn't want Ada to moderate 196 but they weren't doing it either, what the fuck?
Locking the existing version of a community and forcing people to move to another instance without any prior consultation is indeed quite rash
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