OpenStars

There was a great mini-series we had going on in Lemmy about this... I can't find any of it now though. So this is the best I can do on short notice:

Edit: ooh, here's one of them:

Thank you for your service. You are part of the solution here, we all can see it:-).

Well, there was something about encouraging assassination, though it was two months ago. Possibly the admins were noticing a pattern of behavior and just decided to hell with it.

So imho the chief issues here are perhaps more related to transparency, explaining what happened - OP had no idea even? - and why (as in precisely which rule), rather than trying to guess if it was justified or not, especially since we can no longer see all the linked stuff (unless someone has admin privileges and wants to look).

Edit: also, I just had... significantly more than a sip, of 70 proof whiskey, so apparently I knew that you were going to say this? Yeah... we'll go with that:-).

The only ways that I know of to user-block Lemmy.ml:

1. non-Lemmy PieFed (you can block any custom instance you wish - it lacks some polish compared to Lemmy but it's really growing up strong and is even ahead in some ways, e.g. this one) or Sublinks, in the meantime Tesseract on dubvee.org that says it will switch to use the latter eventually. Edit: I forgot to mention Mbin, b/c I am not sure if it can or not. Someone said that originally Kbin could user-block whole instances, but there seem to be reports that Mbin cannot for whatever reason, and I have not made an account to check it out personally or a post to ask someone.

2. lemmy.cafe that is very welcoming and has blocked all of the big 3, + threads, and interestingly, virtually nothing else. I think this should be among the new default recommendations really, the only downside seems to be that it has only a single admin so perhaps less stable than e.g. lemm.ee (though the latter allows lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - which for some people is a good thing, but for people who want the opposite of that, without other additional restrictions, that's lemme.cafe). It is notably running 0.19.6-beta.9 though, so the admin seems super on the ball, and it has really nice welcoming messages too, guiding people to a variety of helpful resources. Edit: oh I forgot about your instance, quokk.au, also only a single user, though it doesn't block lemmygrad.ml for whatever reason, but yes that's another option.

3. someone said that the Boost app allows user-blocking of instances. I cannot confirm personally nor know of others - Voyager (on Android) cannot, but what about e.g. Sync?

4. Lemmy ostensibly has a "user block of instances", except it doesn't really at all - all it does is block communities, not users, and what little protection it did offer irt the latter has actually weakened over time (e.g. for those in Lemmy.World running 0.19.3, users from blocked instances cannot trigger a "notification", whereas for most people outside of that running 0.19.5 they can). At this point I don't expect anything that will allow blocking lemmy.ml users to ever be released on any instance running the Lemmy codebase - the only options seem to be move to an instance offering defederation, leave Lemmy entirely, or suck it up and swallow what you're given.

It makes sense that most instance admins do not want to defederate though, b/c some communities are still held hostage on the lemmy.ml instance - e.g. [email protected] with 3.6K MAU (monthly active users) vs. the next largest one [email protected] with only 0.7K MAU, that's an enormous difference! Actually it would be best if communities, especially niche ones, were not held hostage by ANY kind of political maneuvering - except there is literally nothing these days that is not political, it would seem, including "facts" themselves.

But yeah, one reason to move communities off is that the mods themselves could accidentally get booted, or at the very least their users could at any point say something that sets off the ban hammer - and then never be allowed to post or comment in the community again? Unless it's a community called I_fucking_love_Russia_and_China_too, it's a risk that can seriously fragment the Fediverse, to tie that content to a certain brand of political thinking.

Especially one that is nowhere written down, and could change at any given moment, also without any prior notification.

But so long as you continue to use the Lemmy software, what right does anyone have to complain about how the devs wish to implement their own code, which they wrote for themselves, for their own desires and ends?

If we want better, we have to make things that are better, on our own.

Unfortunately I cannot see my own image here:-(. There is no Preview functionality yet on PieFed, though I confirm that you can see it properly on Lemmy.World. So there are some kinks to be worked through... but yeah, maybe this doomed instance that looks at first like it's behind Lemmy will pull through and ahead! :-)

This has nothing to do with the community. The modlog shows that you were banned site-wide from lemmy.ml, which is implemented by a ban from each individual community individually (so despite how this says it was done by a "mod", it was actually an admin):

Removed Comment So they are doing a China? by [email protected] reason: Rule 1

It is an unwritten rule that you are not allowed to criticize China there. Or Russia. Or anything else that they do not like.

Wait, let me get this straight.

First, you kill the person with the power, then you get the reward?

So let's see, who - after killing Tuvix - has all the power now..., hrm... which one could it be...?

-conservatives

This post does not present the requisite context, which is that this community is a bit special in comparison to others. Read the sidebar text where it explains more how the mod wants people to use it differently. On Reddit there were some others like that, e.g. CMV, and had different-styled icons to help people realize that - before the days where people just expected every single sub to function identically so that they could bother not reading the sub rules before posting or commenting in it.

e.g.:

Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.

I suppose it depends on how bad it is. e.g. if it's a community for "videos", and someone submits one with unmoving text that is basically an audio file, you could downvote it then for not matching.

Some software - like PieFed and some Lemmy apps - have automated features that rely less on human moderator intervention and more community feedback, to either auto-collapse or even auto-hide replies with downvotes below user-set thresholds. You can ofc disable these, but if you want them... they are there for you. Also they are immediate, as opposed to waiting until a mod wakes up and finds time to render a decision on everything reported since the last time they checked in.