It's invalid, not invalid. You have the emphasis on the wrong syllable. English is dumb.

Not really. That has to be a bug in kbin, not a problem with Lemmy. Lemmy allows admins to delete stuff off their own instance, but kbin shouldn't be just accepting that as a mod action from any admin on any server it's federated with. That doesn't even make sense. I assume it's just a weird interaction of different ways of handling things on kbin and Lemmy.

A phone is a radio broadcast device. If you're sending something unencrypted from it, anyone nearby can listen in to what it's sending. Of course, it's all compressed and sent with different protocols depending on what app you're using, so it's not trivial to read messages from everyone to everyone all the time, but if someone is determined it's quite doable. SMS messages in particular are famous for having that happen to them, but it can happen with any unencrypted message.

lemmy.ml has a completely different idea of how it wants to be run. That happens to have been hurt a lot less by a sudden massive influx of new users, but that wasn't the reason it was different. What do you even think beehaw could have done that would have better given their goals?

Easily forseen if you knew that lemmy was suddenly going to have a hundred times as many users in the space of a couple weeks. That was the thing no one was prepared for though.

I'm not denying that it sucks, but if you'd told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they'd have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn't as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn't a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.

This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I'm more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they're trying to put out the fires in the short term.

To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn't expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it's pretty reasonable.

Downvoting has always been used as an easy disagree button in every platform that has ever had it. Why not stop pretending it means something else and just embrace how it will inevitably be used anyway?