It’s going to happen. I’m just hoping there’s a mechanism to keep tabs on which mods do this over time so admins can determine if action needs to be taken.

Like, what I’m learning is that I could moderate a community right now and when i argue with someone and I don’t like what they have to say, I can ban that person from my community. And, ok this is fair to an extent to create safe spaces online. I guess it gets challenging (maybe for admins) when the community is a larger one like politics and the speech is not really unsafe but more unwanted.

Something a code of conduct would help clear up.

This is tricky too.. I haven’t looked at your comment history so I’m willing to accept that maybe you did something somewhere to upset this mod. This may not be the case but if it was and that was the reason you were banned, that presents a few problems:

• you’re seemingly contributing value to that community. that should, in a perfect world, remain in that community.
• to the extent that you are the baddie, should your well-behaved valuable posts still be considered valuable?

Or to pose the question another (hypothetical, not referring to you) way: should we let a nazi/far-right/facist remain a contributor to a leftist tech support community so long as they are not antagonistic to other users / abide by the rules of that community? I don’t have a clear answer here. I think most people would agree that it’s fair to allow this if the person is truly not antagonistic and is adding value. Other people might say that that person doesn’t deserve to exist in polite society no matter what “value” they might add.

That’s an extreme example, but I’m trying to strongman the mod’s possible reason for banning you.

Another thing for a moderator code of conduct might be to provide adequate ban reasons, possibly generalizing some only in cases of safety / legal reasons. I mean, mods / admins shouldn’t need to write a novel, but it also wouldn’t be technically too difficult to create a page that would link to the specific posts which were removed or which lead to the banning. I realize I’m butting up against outing reporters, so it would be important to maintain that aspect of privacy. I’m just saying when someone says something like “repeated” in a mod report, it would be handy to see the multiple instances. Otherwise, a mod might just look at someone’s moderation history, see mod reports (which may be unfair) and determine those reports constitute “repeated” behavior.

PCIe over IP?

Believe it or not, prison!

I think it's actually a strength of the fediverse. If you believe a mod is acting out, you can escalate to the admins of that instance, and if they disagree, you can set up shop somewhere else and still engage with fediverse content as much as you'd like.

It's better than say, Reddit, where if you disagree with the admins, you have to determine whether you want to leave the entire site. This is why I don't sweat it when there are similar communities across different instances - I think it's healthy for Lemmy.

That’s exactly what I don’t want to do, as it furthers the problem. For instance, a fan of mine created lemm.ee/dipshit without my consent, to try to frame me as the type of person who does this sort of thing.

I am understanding that this is difficult and that maybe “power mods” are what we need to do here, but.. do we want to radicalize folks who otherwise wouldn’t be?

I was banned on reddit and I obeyed. Half of it was because reddit sucks, the other half was because I do respect the work of admins and mods. Honestly, I’m more interested in creating tools to prevent people from circumventing bans than circumventing them myself.

That’s unfortunate. I mean, let’s acknowledge that admins to an extent need to protect mods, and again that mods do labor for free. Lots of mods do the work they do because they want the communities they cherish to flourish.

But let’s also acknowledge that there is such a thing as user churn and that will ultimately be the downfall of any site. With enough money you can burn through the churn indefinately. Volunteer sites will just disconnect and users will go to the for-profit sites like reddit, causing more users to be tracked, the internet to be more centralized, etc..

I think it’s also worth mentioning that mods can create their own burner accounts and use those to troll users. Mods are also humans and if they want to speak their minds they should be able to do so. But, speaking their minds from a position of power puts them in a different power dynamic from users, which reflects not only on them, but on the community and the instance as a whole.

And then users get to see literal scat porn on the front page from a username like “admins are assholes” because a mod wanted troll on main. (edit: this was an actual bit of content I reported not too long ago. maybe it was “mods are assholes” I’m not sure, but it was long that vien.)

^_^