To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously ๐.
What's the point of writing down rules, if mods just do what they want?
But I suppose that's the risk you take when you call someone a liar in a small community; they might be a mod.
Edit:
I'm not trying to say that mods suck, they perform a useful and often thankless job. Just that it can be difficult for small communities to get a healthy number of good mods, which can become a problem.
I got into an argument in the main Technology community a couple weeks or so back and while I admit that it got too heated so that both of us broke the "be excellent to each other" rule, I still feel that an immediate 3-day ban with no warning or notification (I had to check the modlog to find out why I suddenly couldn't comment there) in a group where I'd never broken the rules before was ridiculous.
Didn't help any that the mod almost immediately unbanned the other guy who had been equally unexcellent during the exchange and initially got the same ban and left mine in place..
A ttrpg called .dungeon got a remaster recently and I keep coming back to one of the screenshots on the store page, because I'm such a big fan of the rules for community moderation it enumerated:
There are potentially 3 different groups of people that may ban you for a comment. If you break a community rule, a moderator may ban you as you would expect from reddit. However, since reports also notify the admins of the community instance and the admins of the instance of the reporter, you may end up banned by an admin if they believe you are breaking an instance rule.
The modlog is great for transparency, but lemmy should also make it clear what group has banned you and why. I haven't been banned before so I'm not sure what that process looks like currently though.
It can happen in any lemmy.world community, even if you did absolutely nothing wrong and you wont be told anything, not even that you have been banned or why. You just suddenly can not log in any more and when the ban is over you might even find that all content you ever posted has been deleted and can not be brought back. Lemmy.world admin team urgently needs to improve their banning practice and they should really consider to start answering emails. On the other hand, did I already tell you what a great instance lemm.ee is? They also have a very nice admin team over there ...
I didn't get a ban, but definitely had a post "disappeared" with no explanation because I had the audacity to mention the extreme anti-Israel bias around here.
It happens on Lemmy all the time. I've been shadowbanned at least three times, all on the bigger instances.
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They're moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
Also, the fact that it's possible to shadowban people and the software itself doesn't circumvent that by auto-messaging you or putting a banner on the top of your screen when you are banned from an instance or community is reason #589238923 why Lemmy fucking sucks ass.
Some improvements I'd like to see, but maybe I'm missing something and could be a bad idea
The submitter gets notified if an action is taken on content they've submitted or on their account.
Define rules with a tally of how many times a user breaks each of them, with well-defined consequences that can be programmed.
The addition of polls
Restrict polls to users already subscribed to the community at the time of the poll creation, or with a minimum of xx days subscribed and/or xx amount of submissions, upvotes, etc
Have the rules voted by the community, and moderators elected/impeached by its community.
I've been shadow-banned from a few subreddits when I was still on the site.
Not. One. Warning.
on r/images or r/gifs or something, I 'and my ax'ed on some random thread. Banned. Thread context? All deleted. No warning, no explanation, and when I asked for feedback I got something like "the ban holds" or something.
Honestly, I'm a dick a lot of the time, but I simply can't reconcile a ban for "and my ax". Ban me for the actual stuff I do, sure. A warning would be excellent. But that one bugs me the most as I can't learn from it.
Public warnings are bullshit, anyway. They post a reply, warning you for saying something you didn't say, often /u/ mentioning you, then delete the original comment to cover their tracks.