Link to Modlog

I'll just post my initial comment in the entirety since what happens is entirely predicted by my first comment.

The topic was trans athletes and, like with any hot button political issues, there are rigidly defined 'sides' that come with a list of things that you must profess.

These things are simply declared as not being open to discussion and if you challenge that declaration, ye power trippin' bastards rear their ugly head. This dogma is unhealthy in any community and the people who enforce it through social pressure, cyber bullying and mod powers are actively harmful.

As to demonstrate my point I continued with the conversation, responding in good faith to the people who attempted a conversation, right up until I was mass banned (which only took a few hours).

The first comment is here if you want to see the entire conversation or think I'm hiding some secret transphobic rants in my comment history: https://lemmy.world/comment/15496985

The Initial Comment

This is an issue that exposes some of the more dogmatic people in the movement.

It is as if there is a list of positions that you’re required to believe and if you disagree with any one of them you’re labeled a heretic (transphobic, in this case).

Sports and the fairness of competition is a complex issue even when you’re just talking about cisgender competitors:

Can a person use performance enhancing drugs to train and then get clean enough to test positive for a competition? It seems unfair, to me, for the other competitors if this is the case.

It isn’t an unfair statement to say that the physical performance of cisgender men is higher than that of cisgender women. This is why we have separate competitions for men and women.

The issue isn’t as simple as a choice between “Transgender people should be free, without question, to compete in any competition” or “Transgender people should not be allowed to compete as their gender”

Framing it in such a black and white manner is harmful behavior, no matter which position you take.

We need to understand how people’s bodies are affected and what advantages of disadvantages are obtained and then base the rule changes on objective data and not appeals to emotion or ideological bullying.

Fabricated Pretexts

The last thing I said on the topic (bold added), as there were already commenters insinuating that I'm secretly a transphobe rather than engaging in discussion, was:

Obviously the people arguing that trans people should never compete are ignorant, I’m not supporting that position. From the point of view of fairness in competition there has to be an objective answer that’s backed by objective tests.

Simply declaring that trans people are beyond reproach and that any attempts to quantify biological advantage are unfairly discriminatory and anyone asking these questions is a bigot isn’t helpful.

I include this because included in the reasons for the bans is: "Transphobia attempting to make excuses for trans exclusion from sports." This is completely misrepresenting what I said and what I believe in order to create a pretext for a ban.

And the power trippin' bastards come in with the sweeping community bans (linuxphones@lemmy.ca, really?): https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=2&actionType=ModBanFromCommunity&userId=12926811

Conclusion

This kind of thinking is harmful to any community.

Labeling disagreement as bigotry is nonsense. Refusing to engage on a topic and using filters and bans to hide from people who don't perfectly align with your ideas is not how you make allies or educate people.

The people that do this are responsible for creating the impression that your communities are hostile and made up of extremists. Attacking allies because they don't fall in line without question is a blunder.

People with moderator powers should be held to a higher standard of responsibility and fabricating reasons for bans and mislabeling people as bigots is the ultimate abdication of that responsibility. These people are not interested in helping a community thrive, they simply want to be the ones with the power to strike out at people that they want to hurt regardless of the damage that it causes.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk (except you, Linuxphones@lemmy.ca, I pray you never learn how to exit vim)

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39616364?scrollToComments=true

https://lemmy.world/u/sag@lemm.ee

https://lemmy.world/modlog/?userId=1957570

Underage, you will be unbanned when you turn 18 (happy birthday in advance)

Modlog: https://feddit.org/modlog/242334

Tl,dr: got a 3 day banned for pointing new joiners to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk , a more active version of !buyfromeu@feddit.org

Context

!buyeuropean@feddit.uk was established to promote European products and services. It got popular recently due to the US decision of potentially dropping support to Ukraine. It had a diverse team of moderators, and was getting some activity.

A feddit.org user (potentially unaware of the existence of the first community) decided to create !buyfromeu@feddit.org

They deleted their Lemmy account after, but promoted a new moderator before leaving.

This moderator created a post to vote about keeping the feddit.org community, or consolidating with the feddit.uk one: https://feddit.org/post/8679890

That vote itself is kind of debatable, as the only option to vote for the consolidation was to downvote, which is not enabled on instances like Blahaj or Reddthat. Also people tend to upvote more than downvote, so the votes expressed may not reflect the actual opinion of the community, but anyway.

Usually, I don't really care that much about consolidation, there has been a lot of parallel communities for a while, like

• !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id
• !movies@lemm.ee and !movies@lemmy.world
• !privacy@lemmy.ml, !privacyguides@lemmy.one, !privacy@lemmy.world, !privacy@programming.dev, !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

It's not that big of a deal usually, but this case is a big different due to the BuyFromEU movement.

BuyfromEU movement and Lemmy new joiners

https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/ is getting quite large recently, even getting some press coverage. There are a few posts promoting Lemmy over there, with more or less success.

What happens then is that people join Lemmy, just look for "buyfromeu" and find the feddit.org community, while the feddit.uk is actually much more active. Some stats:

feddit.org:

• 1.04K users / day
• 2.34K users / week
• 3.02K users / month
• 3.02K users / 6 months
• 1.9K subscribers
• 125 Posts
• 1.34K Comments

feddit.uk:

• 3.79K users / day
• 8.11K users / week
• 8.86K users / month
• 8.92K users / 6 months
• 2.7K subscribers
• 354 Posts
• 5.58K Comments

The main issue with this is that as the usually is kind of active, they think that the feddit.org community is the main community on the topic, while the feddit.uk is much more active. So I started to check for new joiners account, and if they hadn't posted or commented on the feddit.uk community, I would point them to it, with comments like

Welcome here!

A few pointers for you:

• !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
• !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

The sidebar also lists a few complementary communities to this one, such as !buyeuropean@feddit.uk or !europe@feddit.org

Apparently this seems enough to give a temporary ban. The mod team is also quite expressive about the "consolidation cannot be discussed stance" https://feddit.org/post/8905532

Just to add some more context, those are the type of comments I give to every new joiners. Some recent examples

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/17196236
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/17196078
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/17196020

Now, a last section about why I'm personally in favor of consolidating.

Federation and decentralization is about spreading power and responsibilities, not splitting a small user base between different places

Some people argue that consolidating communities goes against the spirit of federation and decentralization. However, for people posting content, there is a consensus that our small user base can only sustain so many communities. Splintering the discussion between places is detrimental to the whole platform. Example of recent consolidations:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39499941
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/31158164

In the buyfromEU / buyEuropean case, we see people asking recommendations on the same topics on the two communities, while they might have seen a post from the other one is there was only one: https://feddit.org/post/8925080/5204057

Note that there are cases when new communities need to emerge due to power tripping mods. But here, the feddit.uk mods and admins have been good, no such issue to be reported.

Also, quite a few communities are "the main ones", without any parallel community

• !europe@feddit.org
• !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
• !gardening@lemmy.world

Choice overload and decision fatigue are a thing

Too many options hurts users’ decision-making ability. How they feel about the experience as a whole can be significantly impacted as a result.

https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/

Isn't one for European Union and the other for the whole Europe?

The text what to expect says, that we are focusing on the EU, but if other befriended countries slip through we are not enforcing rules. We called it a soft limit, so pepole tend to limit themselves, rather than mods jumping each post.

https://feddit.org/comment/5211878

Due to the inherited name, buyFromEU we would like to soft limit the discussion to the European Union countries. We are tempted to read this as EU + friendly countries as long as this is within reason.

https://feddit.org/post/8545702

Wouldn't consolidating lose people?

An example of successful consolidation/migration: https://lemmy.world/c/football

Shouldn't people see the other community from the sidebar?

Sidebars aren't usually visible on a lot of apps, on Voyager for instance people have to actively look for it:

https://vger.app/search/lemm.ee/c/buyfromeu@feddit.org

Why is this case different from other parallel communities?

Due to the growth of the /r/BuyFromEU sub (now at 148000 subscribers), some posts promoting Lemmy are appearing every few days: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7vkrg/the_european_hosted_reddit_alternative_lemmee_is/

As you can see, the main comment is about community split across instances. The commenter was incorrect about the working of federation, but us being unable to provide one community for the discussions to happen isn't putting Lemmy in a good light as a viable Reddit alternative.

Banned last night and all my comments removed for calling out a Zionist troll who FREQUENTLY posts comments trashing Palestinians and celebrating death in the name of Israel.

But I'm the one that gets banned for Checks Notes "Rule 3: No Nazis, QAnon or similar"

What a circus, mods did ZERO due diligence before banning and the Zionists comment remains!

So, one of these 4 is a certified Power Tripping Bastard

*Edit: NOT TO MENTION the frequency with which I am in the Ukraine comm in support of Ukraine and correcting false comments and shit, THE KIND OF SHIT A MOD IS FOR.

Edit 2 I will concede that maybe I posted in haste. I was seeing red for a moment there because how the fuck is a user like that still just out and about commenting.

I would just like anyone who reads this to start being more aware of WHO you are interacting with on Lemmy and be more mindful of the scum around here that have popped up more and more as reddit migrants come in. We should NOT be "tolerant" of these people, they can go fuck off to X and Meta and their other fascy platforms.

I really have no idea why I was banned from those two communities specifically. I don't think I've interacted with any of them (apart from reading/voting) for weeks. It's not an instance ban.

If there is a better place to post this, please tell me.

EDIT:

I posted a link that was falsely flagged as malicious, have been unbanned! See comments for more details!

What makes this worse is the obvious disrespect from Cowbee of my request to disengage. I made it very clear I didn't want to argue. These communities have absolutely no standards of behaviour for members of the in-group. Which is exactly why I don't engage with them in these communities.

Well, also the fact that I hate being constantly called a liberal for not repeating Capitalist Putin's latest botfarm talking point. Talking to these people is an exercise in keeping my calm while I am constantly insulted. No thank you.

Apparently posting pictures of Nazis being punched in the face on r/pics is ok, but saying this Nazi loving pos should be punched in the face isn't... Apparently that is encouraging violence, and is a problem, but showing violence isn't promoting it and isn't a problem...

Cool 7 day ban, I just won't be going back.

I'm gonna get real with you folks, we've had way too many of these posts recently. I've been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldn't care less about my gender identity. But just because that's true for me, doesn't make that true for everyone.

The beauty of the fediverse is that if you don't like the way a particular instance or community is moderated you can simply choose another to hang out on, or create your own.

Blajah has made it pretty clear by now they will ban anyone who argues against the validity of xenogenders, in order to create a safe space for those folks. That's fair enough imo.

Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajah's admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.

I can completely understand why Blajah users don't want to have to constantly argue with external users about the validity of their chosen identities. Bans are one way Blajah has decided to manage that problem so that their users can experience lemmy in relative peace and safety. While it is a blunt tool and I have my reservations about preemptive bans, there are not many other options for @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, other than defederation from most instances. That would be a terrible outcome for the fediverse as a whole.

In order to help Blajah to maintain their safe space, I would like to propose, if @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com agrees and community sentiment is positive:

• that we no longer accept posts about this topic in this community; and ~~- we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.~~

That's all folks, have at 'er.

Edit: thanks for all your feedback and comments. I think it's clear that the vast majority of people are fed up with this topic coming up repeatedly.

Summarizing the feedback, I'd say most folks would prefer to retain previous posts for the sake of posterity, and to serve as an example of why we don't want anymore of these posts. I'm happy to take that on board. For those folks saying I'm a PTB for intervening in this way, I'll just remind you that I haven't made any arbitrary mod decisions, and I've consulted with db0 and the community as a whole before taking any mod actions.

I think the way to move forward with this is to acknowledge that there's a bunch of queer and straight people who have a problem with xenogenders. Personally, I think that's a valid perspective and shouldn't sanctioned on our instance. But for Blajah, they've drawn a line in the sand over this and that's ok too. Our instance won't be blocking anyone over their opinions on the topic, especially in this community where free discussion is necessary and encouraged. But safe spaces should be respected.

A lot of folks mentioned I should more more specific about the "no more posts about Blajah's mod policies" rather than making it a sweeping and overly broad statement. I think that's good feedback. I will amend this to "No more posts in this community about the validity or otherwise of neopronouns, xenogenders, and bans originating from Blajah about gatekeeping or transphobia. This is in recognition of Blajah's safe space policy. You are of course free to discuss those topics outside of this community.

Note that this decision isn't about ideological gatekeeping, its about reducing the workload for our own mods and admins in trying to moderate this community, and to avoid iterating over the same old topics again and again.

Blajah isn't getting a "free pass" over YPTB posts - if you feel they are power tripping over other issues then feel free to make a post here. But if it's a post questioning the validity of xenogenders or about Blajah bans for gatekeeping then that will no longer be allowed here. Those folks deserve a safe space on Lemmy, even if it's not a mainstream opinion.

For those folks who feel aggrieved about being accused of "transphobia" or "gatekeeping" over their views on this topic, I completely understand just how hurtful it can be to be unfairly (imo) accused in this way. I've been in the same position, and I also found it difficult to deal with. I want those folks to know that our instance does not require you to support xenogenders in order to participate in our instance. However we do require that you use preferred pronouns whenever they are specified. That's been a longstanding instance policy on dbzer0.

Thank everyone for your feedback.

Was banned on a totally different instance and community despite never commenting in the community.

I suspect I was banned for questioning the narrative in this thread yesterday:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/be066e3c-b1ae-416c-bc71-248d3056c6ed.jpeg?thumbnail=1500&format=webp

I am a trans person and have no issue with trans people expressing who they are. The mods and admins of blahaj frequently use Gatekeeping as a false umbrella ban for any user they want to get rid of. This is also discussed in yesterday's thread by some users.

The owners of that 196 space have proven they are unable to let sleeping dogs lie and are hellbent on tearing down all other instances in a tribal war, and have decided to start lurking in other spaces and preemptively banning people like reddit mods.

This is not fair moderation practices, it's a petty tit for tat because abuse in their community was called out yesterday.

There's no removed comments. I looked through my profile cause like sometimes I just be saying shit so I was okay maybe. But I can't find any comments on that community. Just the old 196.

Idk if this is where to post this but I just wanted to rant. It's my first time ever being banned so it felt ouch.

Apparently I don't have the mods account it's just verified on the app. Seems like mods on certain comms just make up whatever placeholder reasoning when you don't break the rules. I thought you had to blame the victim to victim blame and my post didn't blame anyone for anything.

So, I made a comment on the 'two goobers' community of lemm.ee, moderated by Bubs.

I gave a rather cynical, but nonetheless accurate imo description of a particular comic, explaining that it showed an overly lovey dubby relationship that was likely doomed to failure.

Made some more comments explaining my reasoning, ended up getting into some arguments as two users seemed genuinely sceptical, and one of them very defensive, about the idea that CPTSD is usually caused by abusive narcissists when it isn't caused by ongoing, severe material deprivation, such as being very poor, homeless, or living in a war zone.

As of time of writing this, my first comment was the most popular in the thread, something like 45 up, 5 down, and I have been banned from the community, almost the entire comment chain has been nuked, no explanation has been seemingly given for the deletion of any comments, unless my view or understanding of modlogs is somehow borked, though I am apparently banned (indefinitely?) for Rule 1: No Abusive Language.

I can maybe see how a few of the latter comments could veer into being interpreted as 'abusive language'.

Maybe.

... But the entire comment chain?

The two I was arguing with used language about the same level of 'abusive' as myself.

They don't appear to be banned though, just had their comments removed.

... I ... don't really care about being banned from an apparent hugbox community that has a single mod, but just from a point of ... attempting some kind of professionalism, maybe Bubs could have just deleted the specific comments they found to be 'abusive', sent all involved a clarifying DM about that, not just jump straight to a ban?

I dunno.

I hereby submit this to the tribunal for public commentary.

Here's the link to lemm.ee's modlog

EDIT: It looks like a whole bunch of at least my removed comments are not even showing up in the modlog.

I... don't know if thats because of some technical issue?

I had a bit of a tit for tat with both Ocultoconoclast and Count Regal Inkwell, and you can see their removed comments in the mod log, but my one for one responses are not even showing up as removed in the lemm.ee modlog, though they are all removed/'deleted by moderator' when I go through my own comment history.

https://lemmy.world/comment/15319695

I'm guessing they did this because my comment didn't have the correct positive vibes for them on their post when they're the moderator.

It's funny because 196 and almost all of its derivatives are rightfully anti-tankie because tankies promote centrism and conservatism directly harmful to trans and gay rights.

Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word "American" to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.

Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?

A mod from World News@lemmy.world.

What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?

I had my comment removed and received a one-day ban.

Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).

Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).

Original post: Pope is in ‘critical’ condition after suffering ‘asthmatic respiratory crisis,’ Vatican says

Like many of us on Lemmy, I think the Catholic church is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, including the way they were/are directly involved in blocking access to contraception leading to the needless death of millions of Africans due to the AIDs epidemic, the endless cases of child sex abuse, along with the ongoing coverups, and honestly too many awful things to mention in detail here.

So I left a comment that said:

The Catholic church at this point has all the moral authority of a child sex cult.

Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

Amend community rule 4 to remove the reference to religion. WTF is it doing there as a rule in a news community in the first place? Is LW being run as a theocracy now?

Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ~~anti-religious,~~ or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.

The mod in question is also ~~a~~ religious ~~weirdo~~ (see below during a discussion about Luigi), so perhaps that is why they have the rule in place. But if that community not going to accept fair criticism of religion then it isn't a serious news community imo.

I fully acknowledge it wasn't a long ban and the rule was in place, so it was perhaps a BPR or YDI in that sense. But the rule shouldn't be there in the first place. How on earth is it justified? And looking at the other votes and comments on that post, it's clear that the the vast majority of folks hate the Catholics church as much as I do. So why is this mod running defence for the famously morally bankrupt Catholic church in a world news community?

Summary:

• @Cat@ponder.cat was posting at a high volume to !news@lemmy.world
• there is no written rule on !news@lemmy.world about post volume
• there is no written rule on ponder.cat about post volume
• !news is the one single community Cat was this active in
• !news has no ponder.cat mods
• from my understanding, all rules Cat did break were unrelated to volume (correct me if I am wrong)
• ponder.cat admin @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat reaches out to Cat via comment and then DM essentially threatening account deletion if Cat doesn’t lower their activity level
• Cat understandably deletes their account because who wants that

Of course, PhilipTheBucket had the right to do this, but I also think it’s exceedingly bad form and people have a right to know that this admin is willing to go above the community mods’ head like that.

Internet etiquette has dictates for dealing with undesirable yet not rule-breaking behavior that was just ignored here. Communication should be chosen before simple fist waving and threats.

I agree with this comment that this is a bait-provoked reaction. Next time I recommend:

• at the instance/admin level, the creation of instance rules about volume
• at the community level, advocacy for community rules about volume (i.e. “[Meta] Petition: Limit daily submissions to !news to ensure community quality”)
• avoid personal slapfights to get your way
• avoid escalation directly to account termination threats

Source: https://ponder.cat/post/1731587

This one is both upsetting and weird.

So there was a user on ponder.cat who's been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.

I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods' business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.

A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account...

Touch grass. Good lord. You're carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.

The user was not receptive.

lol.

I guess people here do not know how to block an account.

:)

Is that a compliment or a rant?

May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.

If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.

That's a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:

That's not how it works. If you're interfering with the average Lemmy user's experience, you don't get to claim it doesn't count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That's too much. I post a ton, and that's about 10 times more than me, and I've gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it's happened, my reaction was "Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level" and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don't be dismissive about people's complaints to you about it.

They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.

Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.

Well, that was weird, but at least it's all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait... what's happening now?

I wasn't expecting "making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam" to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.

https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347

@Ghyste@sh.itjust.works

Apparently 2022 is “a long time ago” and this user doesn’t understand what former means. Can’t state facts about things unless I’m holier than someone, which is devastating news for my shitposting career.

https://lemm.ee/post/56149598

Apparently, talking about respecting human rights is "imperialism apologia".

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29191692

I don't even know what to think about this one. I'm not angry, more confused than anything. There's only one mod there so i asked them, and they said "It's against policy. It's the abbreviations policy."

I see no such policy anywhere, so who knows what's going on. Is it only the NYT that can't be abbreviated? What about the US? Is LOL forbidden too? And if so, why are we forbidden from laughing there!

They didn't even remove the comment.
The mod is user qrstuv. Maybe the only abbreviation allowed is when they say one? That's a power trip!