Rose

Exactly. Those positions should generally be separated. Relying on a programmer that helps with running the instance on a technical level or developing for the instance inevitably weighs on the decision-making process when assessing their position as a moderator. Having that extra pull enables the moderator to misbehave with impunity.

If you're talking about the upvotes and the supportive comments, I'm not even sure they reflect how the community would feel had they seen the full sequence of events* leading up to that decision.

As I previously mentioned, seemingly the first comment to start the chain of !vegan moderators' and subsequent Rooki actions was the impolite "don't force your shit on them" one-line comment by a user first exonerated, but later banned for trolling in another community by none other than Rooki.

The vegan comments were way lengthier, containing balanced ("it's important to do a bit of extra research", "cat nutrition is too complicated to be trying to make at home") and seemingly thoughtful takes with a link to the NCBI.

Conversely, Rooki's line of arguing contained little but outbursts like "have a nice rest of your life knowing you killed your loved pet" and "If anyone else thinks pets should be vegan i have no problem banning them for being a troll and promoting killing pets", with unsubstantiated yet specific claims like "YES cats can survive vegan diet for few months".

Sure, Rooki admitted to being emotional and said sorry after my post asking for their removal, but what's the weight of that apology if the new rules echo those same talking points, from "misinformation" to the quite specific example "Unhealthy diets, e.g. due to insufficient nutrients"?

*Screenshots sent to me by a !vegan mod after my post - verifiable via the public modlog.

I'm pretty much a reddit refugee in that my reddit activity is limited to checking the community I moderate, simply as a token to all the users, but as I noted in that post, even reddit doesn't seem to interfere in its communities unless pushed to do so by all the other communities. The "free speech absolutist" straw man also hardly applies to reddit, as it still takes action against harassment, illegal content, and things like that - exactly what I would expect from a platform like Lemmy.

As noted in my post on the "moderation incident", by adding more subjectivity to the rules, you are opening the door to even more instance moderator misconduct. There is already evidence of how that would go.

Rooki felt it right to intervene in the !vegan cat food thread (and got a pat on the back with the new rules made to justify their actions), then not only took no issue with comments like "Meat is not something diabetics need to worry about." but also fueled the fire in the same thread by saying "To be honest linking something like meat to death of people is like saying everybody that breathed air died."

So much for taking action against harmful dietary advice.

Meanwhile Lemmy.World moderator Rooki:

To be honest linking something like meat to death of people is like saying everybody that breathed air died.

correlation != causation

(comment source, thread archive)

In the absence of announcements, my understanding is that it's highly unlikely that Rooki will be removed for the misconduct.

Firstly, it doesn't take a team of two admins and seven moderators nearly a week to investigate a matter involving a handful of comments and six users. Secondly, if it were a broader investigation into Rooki's overall conduct, you'd expect Rooki to at least be asked to pause their moderator activity for the duration, but Rooki continues to ban people and remove comments.

Ironically, one of the users banned by Rooki for trolling today is EndlessApollo, whose comment and subsequent ban by !vegan launched the whole chain of events.

Looking at the modlog, Rooki reinstated the two !vegan moderators and restored one of the mods' comments about an hour ago. Rooki also edited their own comment referenced in the OP to say the following:

Edit: I am sorry, about my emotional decision i reinstated @Eevoltic and @[email protected] as mods After researching myself, many sites say its not healthy, one (1) research paper says it is at least NOT unhealthy, but it has few points of data.

Personally, I'm not fully satisfied if that is the end of it. The changes look like Rooki admitting that the issue is not clear-cut, but Rooki's conduct as a moderator has to reflect the rules, not something as arbitrary as Rooki's level of disagreement with someone's views at the given time.

Nobody should have to convince Rooki that something is not misinformation. Rooki (or any other instance moderator) must not even think of interfering on that basis. The word "misinformation" is not in the rules in any shape or form, and the only thing remotely close to it is Lemmy.World accepting that "The content provided on Lemmy.World is not necessarily factually true". If anything, the rules side more with the community moderators' judgement by saying "Your participation in individual communities will only be acceptable on the condition that you abide by their rules."

Edit: Added more to the sentence on Lemmy.World's rule related to misinformation.

That reporting is inaccurate if so. If you follow the Ukrainian news story link in the OP, you can click on the link to Kadyrov's Telegram post and machine translate it or ask a Russian speaker translate its first sentence. It literally says "received from Musk".

This link allows to see all comments removed specifically by Rooki.

Going by this Lemmy.World chart, Rooki is an instance moderator standing below @[email protected] and @[email protected], so I'm appealing to them in the form of a public post so that the issue can't be swept under the rug.

If users or communities don’t like it, they could, and SHOULD move to another instance.

!vegan are already going for that option, but the problem is that if your written rules do not reflect your actual practices, it's a lot like backstabbing because you invite people to build communities over time only to go back on your rules and force the users to migrate, which leads to fragmentation and a lot of members lost in the process.

What's inconsistent about that? Communities have their own rules, which often are and should be much stricter than the sitewide rules. For example, a pro-Harris community may decide to ban pro-Trump posts (or vice versa) to keep it on-topic, but that wouldn't justify a site admin removing the mods and their comments for that. Some communities exist specifically for debates, while others choose to be more of a safe space type.

I'm not a moderator of !vegan, so I can't speak on behalf of the moderators here. Either way, each community has its own rules in addition to the instance rules, so a community can be much stricter (or more subjective) than the instance, which I would expect to be more or less neutral.