TL;DR: We tried to move the community because of moderatorial concerns, but fumbled how we went about doing so.
First and Foremost:
We’d like to formally apologize for springing this on you all out of nowhere, and for taking so long to respond to the backlash. With retrospect, we understand that we should have notified you all beforehand to create an opportunity to give us feedback. We understand that a lot of respect and trust was lost, and we expect it’ll take a lot of work and a lot of time before we can earn it back, but we would be grateful if y’all gave us that chance.
What happened, and why?
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies. By and large they do a great job and align with us on mod actions, but there have been several cases where we strongly disagreed, and our choices were overruled.
For example, 2 months ago, Kolanaki reached out to us via email and said they were banned from 196 for “playing the victim” and asked us why we banned him, but we didn’t. Moss talked to them and realized that the ban was unjust after reviewing the comment he was banned for. If he had never contacted us, we wouldn’t have known about the ban, and they would have still thought we banned them.
There were a few similar events in a short time frame, leading to a few posts/comments in the community about the heavier modding policies. It’s possible some posts/comments were misunderstood by Ada, or she interpreted things differently than we would have, but it led to some bans that we felt were indeed heavy-handed, and would not violate our rules in even the most uncharitable of interpretations. We have found that this is an ongoing trend when it comes to moderation of our community from the Admins. We oppose this because it leads to many users who otherwise mean well ending up alienated and removed for reasons that are frankly completely unfair. This is, in our opinion, counter to what we set out to build in our community.
It was made clear to us that it was their instance, and that we didn’t have a say in who would be banned and what would be removed. This is, of course, perfectly valid. It’s their instance, therefore it’s up to them to decide what goes, but we no longer wanted to be the ones seen as accountable for moderation actions we have no control over. For this reason, we wanted to transfer out of lemmy.blahaj.zone. As much as we wanted to stay in the LGBTQ instance, we couldn’t come to an agreement with Ada, so we talked to her about transferring out and got her blessing.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand. Besides that, we also didn’t explain why we made the choices we made and only gave very vague answers. We avoided sharing the justification for our actions because we didn’t want to cause drama and/or exacerbate the situation, but this lack of substantiating our actions only caused the situation to worsen.
Going forward (if we may), we won’t make the same mistakes again. From now on, we will attempt to be as transparent as possible.
FAQ
Why we chose lemmy.world
Many people have been asking about why we moved to lemmy.world. It already hosts the majority of large communities and besides this uncomfortable level of centralization, it has also been somewhat controversial as of late. Despite that, we still chose lemmy.world due to the following reasons:
- Moss’s communication with the admins, and their agreement to let us moderate the community as we see fit. Ruud, after looking over our rules, agreed to abstain from taking admin action to curate or otherwise moderate our community, unless absolutely necessary.
- The instance is large enough to support traffic without performance issues (other instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.dbzer0.com would have been fine too), and the instance has a certain degree of guaranteed longevity.
- Moss was given a list that was kindly made by the lemmy.world people as a part of our transfer detailing those who are banned on Blahaj.zone, but not on Lemmy.world, making moderation discrepancies much easier to clean up post-transfer.
- Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
- It was, to the best of our knowledge, the most federated-with instance. We have come to understand that this is not necessarily the case.
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
This is a similar situation with what happened over on Reddit. 196 mods didn’t agree with admins and were eventually replaced (difference here is that we were not forced out, but chose to leave). As Lemmy was a large gathering spot for people fleeing Reddit, we felt it was better to try to keep the community together and move together. Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
What about the possibility of more trolls, neoliberals, bad actors, sealions, and transphobes on Lemmy.world?
Another huge issue was that the mods and the community were not on the same page regarding lemmy.world, their admins, and their policies. We understand the concern about trolls/bad-actors/transphobes, but we feel well-equipped to handle these issues. In addition, we’ve been in contact with the lemmy.world admins for a while now, and they’ve assured us that they’d allow us to moderate our community however we saw fit. All this being said, we still failed to communicate that to the community before taking action, which has undermined any assurances that we have given after the fact. We cannot apologize enough for that.
What about the people who are using instances that are defederated from lemmy.world (e.g. Beehaw)
This is an unfortunate issue that we were not aware of at the time of transfer. We’re not sure what the solution is, but want to make our community as accessible as possible. Community solutions are welcome.
Did you migrate because of X? (addressing speculation)
- We didn’t migrate due to anything related to neopronouns
- We didn’t migrate due to us supposedly not wanting to use blahaj.zone lemmy accounts
- We didn’t migrate due to us having friends who were banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone
- We didn’t migrate due to us wanting to make the space less queer/leftist/etc
- We didn’t migrate due to us getting secretly ousted by the Blahaj admin team
What now?
Well, we’re not sure. We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else. Truth be told, we don’t know what to do. For now, we will leave the comments open to civil community discourse, and choose our course of action from there.
Sincerely, Qaz, Rmbp, Greembow, A_Very_big_Fan, Peachy, and Moss.
I think what brother’s me most here is the entitlement and contempt displayed for your own community. You were told repeatedly that nobody wanted this, and yet you doubled down saying “We know what’s best”. You acted like the community belongs to the moderation team, and they can do with it as they please.
It took a mass exodus for you to finally seriously consider other viewpoints. I don’t think that’s an acceptable way for any moderation team to treat their own community.
That’s not something that can simply be fixed by an apology. It’s something that would require some significant introspection.
I’m not sure if they deleted it or I just can’t find it, but there was a post on the LW destination that said the mods talked about the near-universal, overwhelmingly negative response, and were split 2-2 on what to do: either cancel the plans, or keep going anyway. They only made this post after considering the aforementioned near-universal, overwhelmingly response a tiebreaker.
I think that really encapsulates the problem.
The whole team should resign
Tbh I’m happy with the new onehundredninetysix com, I’d prefer if these mods and anyone that supports their decisions move to .world
Really? All of them? Personally, I’d be happy enough taking no more than two heads for this. Whatever the case, I think the main priority should be adding new mods whose attitudes are more in line with the comm.
Anyway, I’m sure there’s stuff that’s happened in private that I’m unaware of, but it seems like qaz has been pretty level-headed about the whole thing, Rmbp, despite approving of the move and thus being generally out of touch with the community claims (believably, IMO) to have had no knowledge of, let alone input over the process prior to the call being made, greembow hasn’t posted anything in a year, and Peachy has wisely kept pretty quiet about it, with a grand total of two (one if we’re not counting duplicates) pretty neutral comments in threads about the mod team’s decision.
Yes, all this and the fact that the move was months in the making but had almost zero* communication with the broader community really just paints a picture of a thoroughly dysfunctional mod team acting in a bubble, but from what little I understand I’d argue this particular fiasco was done mostly on the initiative of the “head honcho of 196” and A_Very_Big_Fan, who made the announcements and were the ones to double down on it in the face of community pushback.
* a month or so ago when PJ really got his knickers in a twist about not being allowed to misgender neopronoun users by LBZ’s site rules one of the mods mentioned they were considering a move to dotworld and got pushback then too
According to the mod team, they were all in on this decision.
So all of them makes sense to me.
Your comment makes sense. To be honest as they stated that everyone one was involved in the redaction of the last communication it seemed just easier to ask for a complete uphold of the team.
after seeing they added this part, they wont
Yeah, that’s not gonna fly. No-one is suggesting we should split the community (though their actions may have already caused that as a side effect).
We are saying they are done as mods and are welcome to earn back trust as regular members of the community instead. In my opinion, they are never going to earn back trust as mods.
Of course that’s just my views on it. I guess we will see what everyone else thinks.
I think its a bit too late for that excuse 💀