Hi all, I'm one of the mods that apparently caused lemmy.world to melt down for two weeks. It's a lovely sunny Sunday arvo, and I'd much rather go catch the last rays of sun in my garden than write about mod drama. Alas, I must have sinned in a past life.
Today the lemmy.world admins made a follow up post about the incident where the admin Rooki interfered with moderation of this community in a way which was determined to be against lemmy.world TOS and factually incorrect. Throughout this incident there has been no communication with me, nor to my knowledge any of of the other moderators of this community. Rooki quitely undid his actions and edited his post to admit fault however there was no public acknowledgement of this from him. In fact I wasn't even told I was reinstated as a mod which is quite funny.
The lemmy.world admins' response appears more focused on managing their own reputations and justifying similar actions in the future than providing a good environment for vegans, and other similarly maligned groups. Their statements about wanting to handle misinformation and overreach better in the future ring a bit hollow when they won't take actions to address the anti-vegan circlejerks under their update posts which abound with misinformation and disinformation.
The legalese written basically allows for the same thing to happen, and that if it does the admin decision is to stand while moderators have to quietly resolve the conflict at the admins' leisure. Presumably with a similarly weak public apology and barely visible record correction after the fact.
This community already has a fairly high moderation burden, with many users coming here in bad faith and getting outraged when they are told to take it elsewhere.
I have spoken with /u/[email protected] and /u/[email protected] and we are of the opinion that given the lack of assurance that admins with an axe to grind wont interfere in the future this is no longer a space we are interested in moderating and can't in good faith recommend as a place to host a vegan community. Instead we would recommend that users come to [email protected] (note, not federated with .world, make a local account), additionally [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] are well moderated and run.
Mods are just glorified internet janitors though, so if any current mods or users want to take over the responsibility of primary management from /u/[email protected] they are welcome to do so and should get in touch. Otherwise I think the consensus is to close this community for now.
Finally I'd just like to express gratitude for the great effort put in by the users here. In particular /u/[email protected] you are a bloody champion for trying to get a better outcome here, we all appreciate it immensely.