TLDR?
There has been some drama here on midwest.social, and those troubled by it have made a sister community at [email protected]. I’m looking for your input on how to move forward.
Where have you been?
This started unfolding at the end of 2024, unfortunately along with a pretty scary decline in my partner’s health, which has resulted in Lemmy taking a backseat in my life. This is ongoing, and highlights the immediate issue of [email protected] being largely unmoderated, which I’ll address below.
What exactly happened?
It feels irresponsible for me to give my own take on something that happened in my absence, but here’s a timeline as I understand it:
- Luigi shoots a CEO.
- User A comments something to the effect of “someone please kill this other person” on a midwest.social community.
- User B reports the comment.
- Admin at midwest.social bans User B for being a “Libbety lib lib.”
- Users start moving away from midwest.social.
- A new LOTR Memes community is started on lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Please have a look at https://lemmy.cafe/post/10511187 and form your own opinion.
What happens next?
I have seen calls to lock this community and sticky a post redirecting people to the new community, in an effort to consolidate users in one place. On the other hand, there are people still using and enjoying this community. I don’t want to abruptly take that away. One of Lemmy’s major benefits is user choice, including choice of instance, and if people are fine with staying here, who am I to force them out?
I would like to hear from the users here. This is your community. If you want to keep it separate, we will. If you want to fold in with the new one, we will. If we do keep this one open, we immediately need more mods, so please PM me if you’re interested in helping out. My partner has another hospital stay for a pretty major surgery at the end of this week and I will likely be dropping off the earth for awhile after that.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Zoidsberg
EDIT
The majority seems to want to keep things running, so that’s what we’ll do. I won’t be stepping down as mod but I will be absent for awhile. I have every confidence that [email protected] will keep things under control, and that this community can happily coexist with our friends on dbzer0. Personally, I will be subscribing to both.
The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.
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Life comes first, and I hope everything goes well with the upcoming surgery @[email protected]. Please don’t add a single bit of stress regarding anything on lemmy to your life right now.
I didn’t catch this drama live, but someone linked it to me after the fact, and I was honestly pretty disappointed to see an admin talk to users this way. I don’t think the reporter was wrong to notify the admins that someone was advocating murder on their instance, and they certainly didn’t deserve to be banned and mocked for it.
Then I started seeing other similar posts (like the one Blaze linked in a different comment) showing that this wasn’t an isolated thing, and I was a bit disheartened because I love sharing memes here, but it’s really hard to build a community when users are worried about an admin lashing out at them. I’ve lost some trust. =(
What are the official policies of midwest.social and of lotrmemes regarding comments like that?
I wouldn’t use an instance on which support for this killing was official policy, but I can respect the decision of an instance admin to permit expressions of support (and of opposition) out of a commitment to facilitating free speech, as long as lotrmemes itself is not a place where such expressions are allowed. I would rather not see any sort of divisive real-world issues discussed in this particular community.
It looks like I will be the main moderator of this community for the time being, and I intend to remove any comments calling for violence or murder. In many circumstances that wouldn’t have to be explicitly stated, but here we are.
I will try to keep the comments free of divisive political topics, but the memes themselves will be allowed to reference contemporary events, so long as they are funny.
I have faith that neither the admin nor the users will cause any undue problems. My hope is that this community will be a light to us all in dark places, even when all other lights go out.
The Galadriel quote tells me things will be in good hands.
Thanks for this post! Just wanted to chime in that I would support moving to dbzer0.
Best wishes on your partner’s upcoming surgery. Hope things go well.
Doesn’t seem as that big of a problem, that it would warrant migrating. Intentionally killing this community seems to be overkill.
For the context, it’s not about killing it. The old and the new communities currently have the same number of weekly active users ( https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active )
There is now a script that allows to ping everyone who posted in a community to move to another one. Example: https://feddit.org/post/6859490 / [email protected]
It’s more a migration than anything else.
With killing this community I was specifically referring to locking it.
Makes sense, then
I’m just here for the memes, some of the best memes saved in my phone are from this community.
I see no need to shut it down over some drama, especially since it’s just that
Didn’t know much about this community, but honestly it gets some of my respect for pushing against the current main narrative.
Violence isn’t necessarily always a bad thing - otherwise, Europe and Japan would look drastically different today.
Leaving out that the reporter was a mass reporter likely stirring up trouble, I think it’s natural in dire and extreme times for people to wish for more extreme actions to happen to evil people. It’s not as of people wishing that will necessarily do it (just in case, I wish for enough money to buy a house and retire with the basics), it’s just a way for them to vent the frustration they have at Injustice they can’t otherwise do anything about.
Not to mention silencing the side that wishes death against those advocating for the death of others always seemed to be… Hypocritical to me.
So in all, I think this community’s admins did good. If people left over that, maybe it’s for the better not to have them.
Just to clarify, as far as I understand, this LOTR meme community and the mods here were not directly involved in that incident. I believe the comment was made on a different community on the Midwest.social instance, and removed by the instance admin.
I understand that you’re in favor of it and I see your point, but I just wanted to clarify the language. Especially with people talking about new users coming to Lemmy, its important to help them understand how it all fits together.
There’s no such thing as a community admin, an admin is basically supervising the entire server/instance (midwest.social), and community moderators run individual communities (such as [email protected]) that are hosted on a particular server/instance.
Well, not gonna beat around the bush, was having a shitty day that day for one thing and I did find the report for someone saying “do elon next!” annoying, and then found out the reporter is a known mass reporter for shit like that, so I at the time decided to just “nip it in the bud” if you will. I didn’t think at the time it was a big deal but I guess it was. After a bit of time passed I decided to reverse the ban. I keep forgetting reports go to both instances’ admins, not just me, so reporting something that is against other instances’ rules is fair.
This probably won’t change anyone’s mind but that is my side of the story.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m entertained by these bans and have no problem with your moderation style.
Users from the larger instances can be melodramatic - it’s nice to see them get burned for it on occasion.
I appreciate your perspective. Thank you.
Hello,
Thank you for jumping in. Could you please also elaborate on this one?
Oh yeah, forgot about that. Looking at it now that looks pretty bad. Was just trying to emphasize I’m not removing it but it definitely looks pretty power trippy and I apologize.
Edit: as far as locking it goes I was getting absolutely bombarded with notifications while at work and I don’t really have an active mod team.
Whatever man, nobody is perfect. Except for Blaze, the hero that Lemmy deserves
Except for Blaze, the hero that Lemmy deserves
I… never said that 😅
It’s what the people keep telling me. And you do display superhuman stamina and dedication.
Just let the community keep running and see what happens. I’ll help moderate it.
It’d be a shame to lose one of the few major communities on Lemmy not hosted by one of the major servers, imho. If midwest.social admins keep making unpopular decisions, then this community will probably wither and the db0 one will take over. But I feel like that ban was pretty funny even though I disagree with it, so I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
The alternative could also occur, if some shit goes down on db0 and the new community actually implodes. I have no reason to expect that to happen, but you never know. Best to let things play out, I’m subscribed to both communities anyhow and crossposting is also something that is quite simple on Lemmy.
Also there’s about 1000 posts and 10k comments on this community and it’s mostly good content, built up over like 2 years. I just hate leaving all that behind and having to start over. I think of new users viewing by top posts of all time and this is one of the better Lemmy communities for that.
I’d like to leave this up for at least a full 24 hours so that people have a chance to chime in, but this does seem to be the general consensus. I’ve gone ahead and added you as a mod. Thank you for volunteering!
FYI, you and @[email protected] should probably use local accounts to moderate, some moderation actions aren’t working for remote account. For instance, he got appointed as a mod on lemmy.ca, but that didn’t federate to https://midwest.social/c/lotrmemes
Reports aren’t fully federated as well: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4744
I’ve put in for a midwest.social account, too. Thanks.
Test!
Thank you!
I figured it wasn’t a big deal because only one of the mods of this comm has a local account.
I put in an application for a local account here though, just in case
Yes, that didn’t use to be an issue but then became one at some point. I just created a reminder post on [email protected], hopefully that can help.
Thank you sir 🫡. I’ll do my best
Hello,
Thank you for the post. Good luck with real life, seems to be a tough situation.
Thanks, Blaze. Its not ideal but life never is. She’s tough, I’m confident she’ll be okay.
Way less drama and way more transparency than the current state of 196 on the blahaj.zone instance.
Zoidsberg you’re still a good mod in my books and I’m not leaving the community over this. I’ll sub to the new community too but it sounds like the comments on this thread are in agreement to stay here.
Thanks for the status update and best of luck with your partner’s health.
I don’t have the bandwidth to pick up mod work myself but hopefully you can find another volunteer who can help share the load on days where Lemmy is taking a backseat for you. All my respect to anyone willing to moderate, we couldn’t do this without y’all.
After reading all the comments and info, I’d like it to stay. It’s one of my favorite communities.
