I DM’d db0 before posting this, but didn’t give them the substance of the post. Without knowing all that was going on, they approved me, but if after reading this they decide to remove it, I understand.
Hey, Fediverse.
I’ve been modding !news@lemmy.world, !politicalmemes@lemmy.world, !movies@lemmy.world, !games@lemmy.world, !gaming@lemmy.world and others for a while now. I’ve been the subject of many posts on this very community in fact. Usually, the people here agree with my decisions, and I appreciate all feedback, good or bad.
Well, as you know doubt know (and if you don’t, go through my comment history), I’ve tried my best to stay out of the whole “Lemmy.world admin/mod” thing going on.
I didn’t post anything other than facts, and I didn’t pick sides. This is because on a personal level, Staments and Jordan Lund are friends of mine. I have talked to them on multiple occasions about many things not fedi-related.
When the whole thing came out from the write-up Stamets did here, I followed it, but kept to myself. Friends shouldn’t pick favorites. I still won’t speak my mind on that topic.
I WILL, however, speak towards how the admins handled it.
They blatantly said that they didn’t like the behavior being pointed out to be the face of lemmy.world. They also took minimum action. For 2 weeks.
What became of that? After 2 weeks, the punted it to the moderation team. Me, and @Tenthrow@lemmy.world .
I can’t speak for Tenthrow, but I was given no notice of this decision. During the 2 weeks of silence, they messaged me a total of 1 time to remind me that as the top moderator of news, I had the power to remove Jordan from the moderation staff.
Now, let me say this: the whole time he moderated news, I only had a single complaint about his activity. I banned him for 2 days for that.
Back to the topic at hand. Fast forward to a couple days ago, and I get a few messages about an update in the lemmy world announcement community.
They had decided to remove top mod from Jordan on all communities without talking to the mods. They then said “The new top mods can now take appropriate actions”. This means that I became the top moderator of !thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world with no notice (a failing on the platform, imo - why couldn’t they notify us when we are added as a mod?). I decided to demoderate Jordan in the communities we are in together, as I just am tired of all the drama. I hope he understands that.
Again, I had no reason to remove him from the mod team in my communities, but for them to pass the buck to me, without any kind of heads-up? That was too much. Us mods do a lot of shit. We take a TON of shit. We’re human, and we make mistakes. All we ask is that the admins keep their shit in their toilet, and off our plate.
This isn’t the first time the admin team has made…questionable decisions. A while back they told everybody that they were not allowing people to remove alternative views. This logically included some stupid shit like flat-earth views. They never changed that rule, but never touched on the topic again.
Because of this, I have decided that while Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole is a worthy experiment, I have reached the end of my time here.
I will say that the people on the admin staff and I are friendly, mostly. There’s the odd person that calls me some weird shit, but I’m a weird guy. Overall, I’ve had positive interactions with them, but they often forget that moderators deal with hundreds to thousands of reports a day (on some days, obviously), keeping the platform civil and clean for them, at no cost.
My final day will be 20 October, 2025. After that, I will leave the account active, but won’t be checking on it.
I wish everybody reading this (and those that haven’t) the best here, and I hope it can be built into something that is better than where we came from. I just don’t have the energy to take hits from both sides anymore.
Sorry for how the admins treated you! Did they even act like they were doing you a favor for throwing you and the others a grenade?
You’ve certainly made the right decision. There’s nothing good about Lemmy.
Enjoy your social media-free life buddy.
I can’t imagine dealing with hundreds of reports. Once I spent thirty minutes trying to decide if a user’s posted video was within the rules. It was a low effort video and barely relevant to the community but I still felt bad removing it and then i had to explain to them why I decided to remove it.
I straight up blocked lemmy.world like a week into using lemmy, I saw the rot that was coming from that house. I think they’re too big for their own good, that power goes to ones head.
Best of luck tho JonsJava, and thanks for your hard work nonetheless - even though I never personally saw it.
(how do you go about blocking a whole instance?)
Settings - Blocks
I don’t even remember when I blocked .world, but every interaction I have with .worlders and any time I see drama from the instance, I’m reminded that I made a good decision.
Unfortunate to see anyone other than extremists leaving Lemmy, but if the stress associated with staying is too much, it’s understandable to want a break from it.
Hopefully if you decide to return eventually, things will have improved by then.
Gonna miss having you around man. I appreciate all you have done and hope to see you come back soon. I get it though. Trust me… I get it.
Hello,
Thank you for moderating those communities for so long.
Good luck with your break, would be nice to see you back after a while, even just as a lurker/commenter, on Piefed or another Lemmy instance of your choice.
Take care!
The more the merrier for Lemmy to me. Would love people staying. Hope you return some day on the much superior db0.
Lemmy.world was always a bad idea no offense.
Modding several political comms was too.
I have no clue about the drama so not gonna talk about all that.
PS. I’m not blaming you for anything. Would love to have you back on Lemmy.
They needed more and more help, and I volunteered. I only have myself to blame.
Nobody forced me to moderate.
I’m not digging into the drama but I appreciate any human that volunteers service for moderation. THANK YOU sorry it’s a burden, but that moderation is one of the negative bits of the fediverse, Lemmy and beyond. it’s more solvable going back the other way with a single top down entity setting the controls. but that seems to just lead to content for profit.
Completely agree. I’d rather have no social media rather than corpo social media
Oh, I’ll keep my mastodon account, but they don’t cross over, the way I see content there.
Moderation is only an issue on comms of certain topics. Or comms too vague and big.
Thats about 20 comms. Noone should be modding more than one of those.
For 2 years I’ve been on Lemmy. Mod 10 communities. I can be inactive for a month and things run smoothly behind me. Never seen any drama, haven’t deleted a single post or comment.
Modding is not a big deal. Just let it run democratically. Hell I noticed 3 comments saying they didn’t like AI on !aneurysmposting@sopuli.xyz and I held a vote.
Poof issue gone (granted thats incredibly low stakes).
Modding several polical comms is just ludicrous. (Not a critique of op, you do you.)
Just keep minimal rules, barely anything more than instance rules and be hesitant about bans etc. A DM does the trick.
Hey Jons, I hope you and your loved ones are doing good. I had enormous respect for you and your conduct on this platform, and you’ll be sorely missed, but you gotta do what’s right for you.
Whether you eventually come back as a regular user, or sign up and give Piefed a go, or this is permanently the end of the line for your threadiverse adventure, I wish you well.
Is .world the only instance or am I missing something here? Like are these admins you speak of all Lemmy or just .world?
as my account is a lemmy.world (as is yours!) account, and the communities I moderate reside on lemmy.world, when I talk about the admins, I am only talking about the lemmy.world admins
I think he’s pointing at at the fact you mention leaving Lemmy because of Lemmy.world issues. Why not use another instance, as a mod or not?
Just tired of it, I guess.
Naturally, I’m a lurker. Moderation has been the most I’ve ever interacted on social media, and that started here.
I think it’s just best to make a clean cut.
No offense, but that really sounds silly. Sh.itjust.works have been nothing but awesome as admins. I moderate a fairly large community and all they do is help out when I’m not around. The whole Piefed thing sounds great too, you can interact with Lemmy, but use a completely different system. Idk, quitting seems odd.
Thanks.
I guess I’m just sad that if I rejoined on a different instance and blocked .world, it would have 1/10 the content.
Reminder: I’m a lurker so any drama would just be more content for me when I’m just browsing.
I’m treating it as a break up. Cut all contact with her and her family.
Does it make sense? Most likely not.
FYI, I had a run in with an admin at lemmy.world way in the beginning of my time here on lemmy. This particular one was deleting my comments when he didn’t agree or something? Not sure why. (*Note: the comments weren’t being removed like a mod would, they weren’t in the modlogs.) I deleted the entire account and moved here to sh.itjust.works because it was too much like reddit. I was then banned from world for a year. I think he called me a bad poster? Can’t remember, but it was funny. It wasn’t a big deal and lemmy was still way better than any other platform. If I were you, I’d try piefed. You still see things world, even if you’re banned. I don’t even notice them and do my own thing.
Out of curiosity, does that person still moderate .world? The world admin I interact with regularly has been very nice.
So 1/10 the content vs… 0/10 by leaving altogether. Do you plan on going back to Reddit, somewhere else, or just quitting cold turkey from all of it?
Cold turkey. Better for my mental health.
Social media is anything but.
No, that’s understandable.
Now, let me say this: the whole time he moderated news, I only had a single complaint about his activity. I banned him for 2 days for that.
If a moderator is banned due to their activity, that person shouldn’t be a moderator.
Moderators are just people doing a volunteer job and make a lot of mistakes. If I see someone being borderline, I always sigh with relief when I don’t have to figure it out, because it’s not one I mod. They’re not on a pedestal, they’re trying to herd kind, unruly, funny, obnoxious, cats.
Everybody makes mistakes.
I gave a ban to show nobody is above the rules. I made the ban length commiserate of the infraction.
Yes, this is the result of a lemmy.world instance decision.
they told everybody that they were not allowing people to remove alternative views.
“They” is solely me. I wanted to prevent things like r/the_donald and r/antivax, so I drafted up a neutral policy to address it. Instead of trying to sell it, I went with an engineer’s view and tried to think of the worst possible consequences of that policy.
I tried to run it past admins for awhile. Didn’t get much of a response, and then published it. After it was published, they had me retract it, and then it was never revisited.
We didn’t always get along, but I respected as appreciated your work as a moderator. Moderating a big sub like !news and not having a third of the community at your throat is an accomplishment in and of itself.
I’d love to have completely different moderators across our biggest communities, but it’s quickly becoming evident why that’s harder and harder to do. People are always more willing to throw rocks from the sidelines than actually try to help the situation.
Thank you for what you’ve done here, and good luck with whatever you decide to do. You’ll always be welcome here, including if you change your mind.
I appreciate it. Yes, you were the one who said weird shit about me lol.
It has been a pleasure to help. I know I have things to regret, but my regrets are outweighed by my satisfaction of knowing I did the best I could.
I don’t see myself changing my mind. I did this to be a janitor. I would pawn off top moderator role as often as I could, because one person leading too many comms can only be a bad thing. Admin gave me more than I could or wanted to handle, and VERY publicly.
Not interested in the drama, but I would like to thank you for your work!
All the best!
Can’t blame you for doing so, the .world admins absolutely dropped the ball on this one and it’s shitty that they dumped all of this onto you. Shame on them, and I hope you have a better time elsewhere.
