Holy shit.
I guess this is commendable, but it still feels like putting lipstick on a pig.
Or maybe that’s just me seeing reddit getting smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror.
Reddit only intervened and bought in new mods because the previous moderator team ragequit and locked the subreddit.
Five. THOUSAND. users. They were banned for no reason, yet people still defend visiting Reddit. Let it die…
This can happen on the Fediverse as well, though. It might not happen at the same scale as on Reddit over here due to the public modlog, but mods can still ban people for no legitimate reason.
There are lots of other reasons why Reddit sucks. But mods power tripping isn’t unique to them. We have our own fair share of power tripping mods and community hoarders that migrated here from Reddit.
Power tripping on the fediverse is mitigated by various factors though:
-
Public modlogs (as you said).
-
Federated structure meaning a deranged moderator team can find themselves replaced by a copycat community on another instance if they’re bad enough.
And perhaps I’m a bit naive here, but I’d like to think that no respectable instance admins on the fediverse would allow the brazen behaviour of the r/art team. They’d have long been removed.
I run my own instance. I’m the only Admin, I’m the only Mod, I’m the only user. I “ban” people daily. Of course it doesn’t actually do anything but It’s fun it just feels more gratifying than just blocking someone.
But yeah I’d never allow people to sign up for my instance, I don’t have the time nor desire to admin people and mods.
That is indeed true. Only issue I can see is the copycat community might not outgrow the older community. And I think people tend to gravitate towards the larger community if there are multiples of them. Especially newer users who won’t know of the power tripping mods and will just assume it’s an ordinary community. But let’s hope new users joining the Fediverse have better critical thinking skills and start asking questions if they see a community with a strong and active copycat community.
-
To be fair, I would not be surprised the learn the exact same thing is happening on Lemmy, to exactly the same degree of severity.
Lemmy isn’t really any better than Reddit in this regard, unfortunately.
This is entirely down to the instances and how they administer the moderators on their communities. The big difference is that if such a thing happened on the fediverse, if it’s really bad, members of the community could recreate it on another instance and take the userbase.
Ie if the moderators of [email protected] lost the plot, it could be remade on [email protected]. That doesn’t work so well on reddit because “art”, the natural name is taken.
Yes, that is the benefit of federation, but the downside is that if a user is forcibly removed from participation in a community they liked, it won’t really matter that they created a new one if they can’t tell the users in the old community to migrate. But this is talking about worst case scenarios where mods mass ban thousands of users indiscriminately, and not considering something more specific such as when a mod has a personal issue with a specific user and lets their personal feeling get in the way of their job as moderator.
Speaking as a moderator (even though I don’t really do much on a low traffic community), if a mod bans specific users just because they don’t like those users, that’s an abuse of power. But that abuse of power will largely go unchecked because it isn’t big enough of a problem for most users to take issue with, usually.
Banned users will typically either ban evade by creating alt accounts on different instances, or not participate in any Lemmy community other than some community focused on mod power abuse, for example.
Yes, that is the benefit of federation, but the downside is that if a user is forcibly removed from participation in a community they liked, it won’t really matter that they created a new one if they can’t tell the users in the old community to migrate.
Well this is true - on an individual user level. But I am talking about a situation where a mod team (or even just 1 moderator) is so bad, so hated that enough of the userbase for that community get fed up - they could just make their own and use tools like [email protected] or [email protected] to advertise what they’re doing (this does work).
Obviously if it’s just you aggrieved with how a community is run, you’ll find it much harder. But that’s true anywhere.
Speaking as a moderator (even though I don’t really do much on a low traffic community), if a mod bans specific users because they don’t like those users, that’s an abuse of power. But that abuse of power will largely go unchecked because it isn’t big enough of a problem for most users to take issue with, usually.
Oh absolutely, and it’s not realistic to expect administrators of medium to high level instances to micro-manage and oversee all moderator decisions within their instance. But I imagine if you lost the plot on your [email protected] community and started banning people for frivolous infractions, you’d be credibly replaced by a competing community in relative short-order and I would imagine its more likely that the lemmy admins would remove you eventually.
If I started power tripping, I would hope I would be replaced. But instance admins have a rough job just keeping the instance running. Smaller communities are bound to slip through the cracks.
Im just saying, while Lemmy has more protections perhaps than Reddit, it isnt really that different.
Eh, they’d likely be directly told that @[email protected] is losing it rather than manually checking the local logs.
More importantly is the actual ratio. If its 5k out of 500k that would means 1% of bans were unjust, which could just be explain as error margin, but this one is over 98% of the bans that were unjust. It is a blatant abuse of whatever perceived power there is.
How many ban reversals end up with the return of an active user? My guess is, “very few.”
Why were they banning so many people? Is it actually valid?
Here’s a literary recount of the events.
This stems from the r/art drama few days back, also posted and discussed here on this post:
basically after this they investigates the mod logs and found the skeletons in the closet. if really the 5K bans are only the one made in 2025, that would average to 15 bans per day, what a monster…
MOD:
No, I banned you for breaking our rules.
But I can remove all of your old posts as well if you’d like.Strawbear:
Just delete the comment and move on. Sorry I mentioned the word “print”
MOD:
Your history has been removed.
You’re welcome.Omg, so much rage! Some people don’t deserve to interact with humans.
I saw one of the reply in the post that i screenshotted where one guy mentioned 2 years ago while being depressed he was banned for some trivial reason and the mod even unbanned him just to dm him calling him an idiot and rebanned him immediately over and over again for few hours. I’m not sure how true is this but if it is holy fucking shit man…
Probably from power tripping mods getting in arguments or just not liking someone for an arbitrary reason. It’s very common for most power mod ran subs.
I’m sure other popular subs would have similar results if real human beings not trolls reviewed the reasons for bans.
I once got banned from a sub after I was in a discussion with someone they asked for a source so I posted a few sources. Then I was banned from the sub because apparently you’re not allowed to post links in the sub, which was news to me. Then I noticed the person I was arguing with was a mod of the sub and I had been set up. Which in retrospect is kind of funny but at the time it pissed me off.
Can confirm. When I used to participate on reddit I was permbanned from r/DemocraticSocialism for flagging a very obvious bot account, and permbanned from r/okbuddychicanery for linking a circlejerk subreddit the mods didn’t like because surprise! they’d permbanned the person that started that subreddit for reasons they completely made up.
Reddit mods are basement dwelling trolls.
