FediLore + Fedidrama

Hi, LW Community Team here.

We've made efforts to avoid the kind of supermods that existed on Reddit, and this is a great example. We've tried to have more mods with fewer communities each, and to limit the number of major communities under the same mods. This was a disagreement between two mods of major LW communities, FlyingSquid at worldnews and Blackbeard as a moderator of News and PoliticalDiscussion. Notably, this seems to be a disagreement from a couple months ago.

FlyingSquid moderates one major politically involved community (the other is closed). If Blackbeard wanted to ban him from News for report abuse, he certainly could have done that. Admins and the Community Team here try not to get overly involved in individual communities, and that wouldn't seem extremely out of line.

Blackbeard seems to have been concerned about getting side-wide banned by Flying. I've seen no evidence of anyone using the bot outside of extremely obvious scammers, trolls, and ban evasion. And I don't believe FlyingSquid would use that bot inappropriately. If that does become a problem, we'd absolutely take action. You always have the options to appeal directly to the admins (email in the LW sidebar). Currently, it's nice to have the extra help in keeping scams and spam off the site.

I do wish Blackbeard had talked to us about his concerns. He seemed to be pretty reasonable from my interactions with him. He'd be welcome back if we could get through this misunderstanding.

I just wish FS would slow down on commenting. Lemmy world comment sections feel like a FS echo chamber because they feel the need to comment on every single post.

Even if I agree with many of their opinions, that's just not what I want out of Lemmy, so I have them filtered.

Want to drive a power drunk redditor crazy? Block them, do not interact with them at all. It drives those types up a wall.

Whaaat FlyingSquid made a huge deal out of a simple disagreement and made it all about themselves unprompted and made it personal? I'm shocked--that he didn't mention his offspring and him moving to England. 🙄

If you continue to report opinions and simple disagreements as misinformation, we will take action against your account for report abuse, same as we would any account.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to interpret that as a threat to ban the account.

Full disclosure, I tend to agree with FlyingSquid in the instance that kicked all of this off. I don't have a clear opinion of them as a mod, but personally I wish the LW mods would do a lot more about the "Kamala Harris = Hitler" type of misinformation that gets a free pass on a lot of LW.

FlyingSquid comes across as perfectly reasonable in this conversation. Their arguments that another mod thanked them for reporting stuff, that it's two reports over the course of ~~two weeks~~ a week which is hardly excessive, and then when the two people couldn't see eye to eye, they said they just wouldn't flag anything, sounds all perfectly reasonable and sensible. For some reason that wasn't okay, and the conversation got personal, with Blackbeard constantly posting these aggrieved attacks about how FlyingSquid was being childish if he didn't continue to report things in someone else's community occasionally, but never anything that the mods there thought was not worthy of removal. And then petulantly refusing to say something along the lines of, "Of course you're welcome to post there if you want" when asked repeatedly if it was okay for them to just post and participate still.

I haven't seen any Discord harassment, so maybe I missed something, but if this is what gets posted as justification for why FlyingSquid is a terrible moderator, I suspect that the "harassment" is more of the same. Maybe it's along the lines of "not saying exactly what I want you to say, or having conversation with other people where you say things I don't want you to say." People are allowed to disagree with each other over what is misinformation, or choose not to report content in someone else's community if they get some hostile responses when they do. Trying to order someone else around and then getting personally insulting with them when they politely tell you "No, I don't agree with how you see it," is ridiculous.

Edit: I don't know why I said two weeks, it was one week.

Flying Squid takes things personally rather often, and can get heated especially on controversial topics. I don't always agree with their behaviour as a user and as a mod, but tbh they are the more reasonable party in this particular exchange, though some of the responses are more annoying. The conversation could have easily ended like 1/4 of the way through by either of them. It's unclear if it's harassment to me, because I am reading it as both persistently acting childishly at times.

If they leave they leave, that's fine. No matter who is right in this, Blackbeard has no obligation to deal with stuff he doesn't want to.

Sounds like this was already resolved within the mod team. So if OP you're posting for history or were unaware, fine (but you ought to look for, ask and add surrounding context and actions, next time). If you're posting just to cause drama and a flamewar, shame on you.

Lastly, discord? Come on, we're on Lemmy here, harass people on a federated FOSS protocol like matrix! /s

I'm not sure how FlyingSquid is the bad guy here when Blackbeard is the one going around DMing Lemmy users off-platform about their reports. If you disagree with the reported content, then dismiss it. Blackbeard is the one who instigated this by opening a DM with FlyingSquid to begin with. Blackbeard doesn't understand how to be a mod, it seems.

This thread is garbage. OP is bad and should feel bad.

Flying Squid has a site wide reputation for being like this. Arguing/discussing anything with this person is like talking to a wall. Not to mention their overuse and abuse of authority.

Everyone Sucks Here.

Oh, this isn't r/AITAH? Sheesh, thought I somehow stumbled back onto reddit.

Why are Lemmy mods from .world coordinating on discord lmao

Blackbeard seems to be okay with Harris=Hitler and doesn't want an "echochamber" but is going to bluesky?

lol

lmao

Speaking to the bot thing, a few of us have access to it in order to remove egregious violations in communities where we may not be mods.

I've used it to remove CSAM accounts and posts for example. Middle of the night spam attacks, and so on.

Really it's for content in which there is no question it should be removed... when the bot is working. :) Sorry @[email protected] ! ;) It doesn't work a LOT!

Jeeze both people come across as petty idiots. Lots of passive aggressive nonsense, and both sides want to have the last word.

Also it drives me up the wall when 2 people argue and one person tells the other to "calm down". And in this case it's "CALM DONW" and "CALM YOURSELF" between line by line quotes. So fucking childish.

I wish Blackbeard all the best on Bluesky; I think they will be disappointed. Human nature is human nature; I've been around long enough to see the cylical nature of social media. A new thing comes along, everyone joins, there is a love-in, and a "consensus" is built around how this time it's be great and what is and isn't allowed. Then things grow and a consensus that holds with 10 people breaks down with 100 or 1000, and people blame the new people for the change.

And mods at each others throats is just the nature of the beast. This has played out over and over on the internet - Usenet through to X, Reddit, etc, and the fediverse will experience the same. It's just human nature.

I’m pretty sure Squid can’t siteban from lemmy.world. He’s not an admin.

So who am I supposed to listen to?

Both of us.

Well that’s your problem right there. If a user (because in this case FlyingSquid was operating as a user) is misinterpreting the rules according to one moderator, but being encouraged to flag content by another moderator (tacit endorsement), the mod team needs to talk amongst themselves and get on the same page regarding the reports. Offering to leave was a bit dramatic, but the mod’s response of “just read the rules” was a lazy move that did nothing to get at the core problem of inconsistent encouragement/discouragement of reporting and clarification among the mod team.

discord 💀

joins the reddit-lite instance

mad that it's like reddit

leaves entirely instead of trying a better instance