What’s Going On With 196, Or, Why We Did What We Did
What’s Going On With 196, Or, Why We Did What We Did
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.
The primary issue that incited this was because we don't fully agree with the admin's moderation policies.
Clearly the community does though.
Which means the community is perfectly happy to continue on blahaj, its you, as the mod team, that aren't aligning with the community.
As someone who enjoys 196 (but only really participates by voting), I would just say that since you aren't aligning with the community, this isn't a community you should be moderating.
Make the !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone mods the mods of !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone and move on.
I think yall (the mod team) still misunderstand what you did wrong. You're just repeating yourself. The problem is not that you failed to announce the migration, it is that you thought it was your choice to make, and that it even was an actionable decision. The fediverse, with each instance having it's own communities, userbase and set of alliances & blockades, does not afford for unilateral deportation of a community.
Furthermore as moderators of a community you'll always have to deal with instance admins. The fact you can't cope with Ada's safe space policy is a bad look. Quoting one debatable decision as "proof" is not helping. Your perception that you are somehow immune to ever disagreeing lemmy.world's admins is strange.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand.
No, your major failing isn't that you didn't "announce" it, it's that you didn't consult your community first. Your actions have demonstrated that you think you own the community, but communities don't belong to mods.
Moreover you have clearly spelled out that your ideological differences are because you don't want to "entertain trolls" which i can only assume means you want to ban people whose identities you deem invalid.
Frankly, get off your high horse. 196 isn't some serfdom. It was a community. You seem to have forgotten that.
The community isn't something that fucking belongs to you.
I cannot stress enough how untrustworthy any of you moderators are now, because how do any of us know that in a few days or weeks or months you won't just randomly close the community and decide you're moving elsewhere. In short, I really don't care if you continue to move over, or stay on .world, or do anything else, I don't want any part of your community anymore. And I don't see how anyone else would either, but that's entirely their business
to be honest, I never trusted the mod team much for many minor things and now I dont trust u at all for this huge thing that u've been hiding for months apparently, if this community is coming back Id personally still prefer a different mod team
We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else.
I guess u could moderate the .world comm for the people that prefer that instance since there seems to be people that do including u, and the people that were going to mod the onehundredninetysix comm would mod this one
i'm from beehaw and i support our decision to defederate from lemmy.world, and honestly, i agree with ada's moderating decisions. i don't come to 196 to deal with people "just asking questions" or getting transphobic trolls coming in and CERTAINLY not cis people whining about how they don't get their good boy ally points
especially if the post about you leaving 196 reports to languish unattended to is accurate (it's from another user on this post who i can't see while on beehaw, i'm guessing they're from a defederated instance. they quoted ada, but i couldn't find her comment as a source, so i don't know if it's real)if that's real, we barely know what your moderation style is, and i've been giving you false credit for ada's good moderationplease see the comments for ada's clarification about the moderation workload (tldr is that the mods are not native to blahaj.zone, so reports might be addressed on other instances but not blahaj.zone, frequently leaving ada to deal with them, aggravating their differences in moderation styles)
so we have reason to doubt where your moderating priorities are, you disagree with noted Good Judgement Admin ada, and you unilaterally decided both to move and where to move the community without consulting anyone first
from my vantage, you couldn't even protect us on world if you wanted to, andit really doesn't seem like you want to, eitheri think the actual respectful thing to do at this point is to just step down. y'all have disrupted this community enough. there are mods who are interested in, and understand the values of, this community. values that you don't seem to share
let them take over and have things return to normal. make a /c/196 on world if you want, it sounds like there won't be a lot of content to moderate anyways
You goofed up and lost the community's trust, own to it and step down.
Maybe touch some grass too.
i don't really accept the apology. 196 is not the mod team and you clearly do not have the capacity to maintain a community. please leave and do not come back to LBZ. i enjoying having my funny little people on my phone here and you have not been very funny so kindly stop the car because you are an underage driver. let someone who does not hit curbs or go up a one way street take the wheel thanks also please let the door hit you on the way out
dbzer0 or shitjustworks would have been way better than world. There's just way too many assholes on world, and even if you ban everyone who is overtly malicious there's still going to be a ton of normal users who are bringing a completely different vibe/political direction than the blahaj users (I say, as a feddit.org user).
If you don’t want to mod under Ada that’s fine. Nothing is stopping you from making a spinoff community. But this is me calling for your team to step down. Hand over moderatorship. You don’t own 196 and you never did.
All do respect(which is none) this is the second time you have tried to forceably move this community to .world. We are collectively done with this bullshit and just leaving for !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone . Thank you for the good year of 2024 with some amazing memes long live onehundredninetysix
My vote is for what I put in the original thread that was ignored multiple times.
Unlock the community, leave it as is, the problems you are mentioning as major factors in the decision simply do not matter that much to the community.
If the mod team chooses to leave and moderate somewhere else because they are sick of people assuming moderation actions done by instance admins are because of them, then they can step aside and mod a 196 community wherever they wish.
However it will be hard or impossible to undo the damage that has been done, with this comment from moss in particular being especially awful. A sentiment like that can’t just be walked back, it speaks to a moderator having little or no respect for the community and not understanding their place in it. The mods contributions are respected & appreciated, but the community is not being respected in turn.
I still don't understand how you thought this unilateral decision, including squatting on the 196@LBZ name, would be received well in the community. I question the soundness of your judgment.
Hold a vote of no confidence. Let the community you tried to screw over decide if the moderators should stay or resign.
Lemmy.world is a rancid instance, and I won't be joining you. I trust and respect Ada far more than the mod team here. Historically, you've allowed so many bad-faith actors here. I just returned, but I know in the past I saw at least one regular here whose alt was banned for queerphobia. He'd constantly stir the pot, and you did nothing. RIP 196, I guess. You'll learn why this was a bad decision, mark my words.
There are reasons beehaw defederates from lemmy.world
I only saw one other person mention the post that's supposedly a good example of your disagreements with adas moderation but that makes it even more clear you need to resign and leave ada was right for removing that comment it's the typical "oh woe is me I just asked innocent questions and the angry trans people try to paint me as the bad guy" trans people don't get annoyed if you ask them a genuinely innocent question about their experience but they will get annoyed if you ask them "just innocent questions" where it's very clear what your real views are and what you're really doing adas just reading between the lines and that's a good thing that's how you avoid the sealioning that .world would've brought along and you say oh they reversed that decision and you would be allowed to ban sealions and you can mod how you like and .world won't interfere but it makes it very clear you wouldn't ban them anyway you agree with the .world admins anyway just leave you clearly don't represent the community in the slightest and have completely different views of how this community should be run hand over the moderation to the onehundredninetysix mod team and go do whatever you want on .world
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.
Translation: "We were scared the majority wouldn't follow us to Lemmy world unless we pseudo forced them to, and we can't imagine life without our fiefdom."
why not open the original blahaj zone 196, and let ada appoint new mods? if yall want to move and have your heart set on that, thats fine, but its clear that there are many people who would lose access to their favorite community if the original 196 remains locked. having multiple instances of the same community is by no means a bad thing, it simply gives more reach for our communities, and more options for every user.
the whole point of the fediverse is that us users can make experiences we like for eachother. its very clear that many people like the way things are, yall dont have to, but we do. its a community because of everybody who participates, lets try and build communities where our queer and trans friends can feel safe and at home. nothing is lost if we have two communities, only gained. let the nature of the fediverse and federation decide how things play out, not a small group of moderators making unilateral decisions for everybody.
I think you should leave this community to a new team and leave for lw ✌️
The actions and attitude presented by the mod team are inexcusable. We have already taken our toys and left. It's time to step down.
Quite a big point missing here
Apparently none of the 196 moderators were actively checking the modlog?
Meaning instance moderator could just see a modlog appearing, and no-one dealing with it.
Moss, I know you can do better than painting the picture one-sided. It's probably pretty stressful now, and I very much understand it.
I refuse to believe that six individuals can be so enormously out of touch with the community they (used to) mod… what’s the real story?
Remember the current Lemmy community was made and populated by people who jumped ship from one site to another due to site drama so we uh, might be really easy to get going.
my honest opinion on the whole matter, and this is as someone who really doesn't care either way. You should give up on the community here. I don't mean that in a mean way, I mean you chose to do a decision that was drastically unfavorable to the majority of the current community on this instance it seems.
Regardless of intentions, your long past the turning point of being able to backtrack on your choice and re-enter the community just reading the comments here tells you that honestly your best bet is probably to just continue with your plan at this point, even if you did decide to unlock the community here it's clear that you've lost all trust in the majority of the users that are still participating on this post, so they'll just stay in the new community instead of returning.
In the words of Kenny Rogers, You have to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run.
This is a clear "know when to run" instance. There is no favorable outcome for you on this community you won't gain that trust back and there are far too many people still pissed about this issue, you are better off continuing the plan on LW and just let the people who didn't agree with it stay on the new community they made (or unlock the old community but you have already been pretty solid on that one)
Thats just my input as a lurking third party.
edit: looks like my feed was outdated, I just got the unlocked post, I still stand firm on my opinion on it though.
edit 2: shouldn't have second guessed myself, guess I had the name right the first time lmao
Rmbp
Is this supposed to be me? Sorry, but I don't write a single word of this.__.
Not that I disagree, but I have not written or read anything before posting this. But nevertheless I thank you for the Update :D
The Feddit.de Instance and therefore my feddit.de Account is broken beyond repair. If anyone can just kick him out, this would be really nice since I can't even log in anymore.
What happend to feddit.de?
The whole Feddit.de instance died under mysterious circumstances.
The owner of the instance left for a work trip to Southeast Asia and never came back—at least, he never came back online. Then the instance started having technical troubles, which we couldn’t fix without the owner. After continued degeneration, we moved all communities to feddit.org. I can’t even log into my Feddit.de account anymore because it’s so broken.
Even the domain Feddit.de is broken.
Reposting this since you said you were going to answer questions in the !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com post but this one is still unanswered:
If the move had nothing to do with pronouns and you’ll continue to enforce rules about neopronouns, how do you feel about one of the LW community team mods making statements like this about them? Do you feel confident that they will always let you enforce neopronoun rules if they decide that it’s hurting LW?
Still No
so this only gets undone once there is another community created on .LBZ that starts getting traction and your new community on .world risks becoming irrelevant, along with your relative power in the situation..
lol 🍿 honestly hope the instance just goes back to being a trans instance, hurry up and leave
First, I want to thank you for this post and taking accountability for the mistakes made with this.
I'll also acknowledge that not being able to see who performed moderator actions can create misunderstandings like you describe.
My own suggestion would be along the following lines:
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Reopen this instance's community on an interim basis. I'll acknowledge I don't know what implications this has for the .world community, and how that would need to be managed.
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Put a user poll up about whether users want this community to be migrated to .world. Keep it up for a reasonable amount of time (say a week).
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Honour the results. If the vote says keep this community here, commit to moderating it here. If there are members of the team who feel they cannot do this, allow them to step down without any flack. You're all volunteers - if it's too much for someone, it's too much. That's fair and doesn't take away from their prior efforts and support.
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If the community votes to stay here, work with the blahaj admins again on how to balance the needs of the community v. the fact that the community wants you to use their resources. Yes, I know you have done this already. But two things jump to mind first:
a) there seems to be a resource problem re: addressing some kinds of complaints/reports in this community in a timely manner. This might be offset by more mods to help out - I know in the wake of this, many have expressed interest in volunteering.
b) perhaps a compromise can be met re: a very basic identification of where a moderation action came from - a simple tag [A] for admin, [CM] for Community Moderator. This would reduce any confusion as to where the ban came from, and with it the rationale. I'm not suggesting this would resolve all tensions, but may help manage their worst impacts.
This seems reasonable to me, but I will acknowledge I am not in your position when offering these.
Edit to acknowledge that while the above was well intended, it looks laughably slow/too little too late now. But I think these might be useful for someone's reference down the road if they consider migration of other particularly large communities down the road, so leaving it here.
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