Tl;dr:
- these are old events, 9 months ago.
- we have since then mostly moved on, but I still thought it could be interesting to document those in this community
- the power trip was a single mod not wanting to discuss how a community should be run and banning people wanting to discuss it
- the new communities we created following this power trip (!movies@lemm.ee and !showsandmovies@lemm.ee) are now more active than the initial one
Hello everyone,
I added the summary of the event in the tl;dr above. If you are here, you probably want to know the details of what happened.
Starting point
As you may remember, there used to be a movie focused instance called lemmy.film. Following its shutdown, a few users were looking for a new movies and TV shows community that would not be on Lemmy.world (if you want to know why some people are against overcentralization on Lemmy.world, you can have a look here: https://lemm.ee/post/30444527 and https://feddit.uk/post/18336398 )
While I was contacting the lemm.ee admins to become mod of the at the time abandoned movies@lemm.ee, another mod (I’ll just call them “The mod” in this thread) created !moviesandtv@lemm.ee. We contacted the other people who were on the old lemmy.film communities and started posting.
I posted a lot over there, if you sort by Old, you’ll see a lot of my posts from back then: https://lemm.ee/c/moviesandtv?dataType=Post&sort=Old
I was also trying to set up discussion threads as they were things who were missing on Lemmy at the time, and a lot of people were complaining about that
I also started asking for a weekly thread “What have you been watching”: https://lemm.ee/post/13386100 which was denied. It wasn’t a big deal for me, I was mostly focused on growing the community, I assumed that we could revisit that topic later. That was on 31 October 2023.
Success for the community
12 November, we celebrate our 300 subs: https://lemm.ee/post/14621123
17 November, I start a weekly thread: https://lemm.ee/post/15176837. 7 comments, reasonable success for a first.
26 November, I am appointed as mod: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863, and start pinning the weekly threads.
4 December, I am removed as mod. I ask the mod to make me mod again (purely because it’s easier to pin threads), they never answer.
10 December, I open another thread on how to handle movie discussions: https://lemm.ee/post/17546624
I let it go for 6 weeks, I keep posting, after all, this is more or less okay. By then, the community has around 1100 subscribers.
The power trip
30 January, I open a thread to discuss with people in the community how they wanted to handle movie reviews:
The post get removed
I open another thread “Are we not allowed to discuss the way this community is managed?”
I get banned
I use an alt to comment
Hello, As you banned my other account, I am now commenting with this one. I’m not going to comment on this that much, the modlog is public, people interested can have a look at make their own opinions. For history, the two removed posts: (screenshots) I guess we can just conclude that we disagree on how to manage this kind of communities, which is mostly fine, that’s what Lemmy is about after all: freedom. I’ll probably contact the people interested in review threads (and there seems to be a few, based on the removed threads and the 200 upvotes on the other post) and see it we can offer an alternative for people looking for a more structured community. Good luck
Comments gets removed: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863
The mod then posts how they want to address the community issues: https://lemm.ee/post/22459747
My alt gets banned.
Please not that those are permabans. Up to this day, I am still banned on those two accounts from that community.
The aftermath
Let’s be honest here, I was a bit annoyed. I had been actively posting to a community, helping building it from scratch from months, to get banned just for asking how we could manage this community better.
I reached out to sunaurus, the lemm.ee main admin, who told me that he couldn’t do anything, as his admin policy was to not interfere with mod decisions. It’s a fair policy that I could understand (even though I was still annoyed). They made me mod of movies@lemm.ee, and I thought I would take it from there.
I built !movies@lemm.ee with the same energy I had put in the previous community. I found other people who had seen the drama happening on the other side and wanted to join forces in building another community. I appointed all of them as mods, because why not.
Over time, our community became more and more popular, and now has 2.97k monthly active users, while !moviesandtv@lemm.ee has 1.52k
The mod had promised to add other mods to the community. They did for 4 months (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863) but then removed them in June 2024.
In the meantime, they also banned another user in April 2024 for similar reasons to the ones used for me: https://lemm.ee/post/30754133
They also removed the AMA we organized in May 2024 on !movies@lemm.ee (https://lemm.ee/post/31335226) because “Unvarified AMA not organized by this community - seems like spam” (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863)
More recently, we started a !showsandmovies@lemm.ee community, which now has 2.35k monthly active users.
That’s it.
PTB
And for the record, Blaze, I don’t understand how anyone could justify banning you simply for trying to post content and community building. If mods are proven PTBs then admins should remove them imo, or it reflects negativity on the instance.
I agree, there needs to be a certain level of admin involvement with the communities on the instance. When there isn’t it comes off as neglectful, especially in the case of allowing power-tripping abusive moderators like this to take over.
I do wonder why @sunaurus@lemm.ee chooses not to interfere in local communities over these kinds of hostile takeovers? I can get wanting to give mods a little bit of independence but I personally don’t really think it’s a good idea to give them free reign since it means it’s impossible to deal with scenarios like abusive mods or hostile takeover.
I guess he doesn’t want to get into potential admin power tripping territory.
This example was quite clear, but for situations where both sides are “wrong”, that would just take admins too much time and energy to have a look at this kind of conflicts.
In the end, it turned out okay, and it was a proof that at least on Lemmy at the moment, if you indeed build a better community, people will switch.
If mods are proven PTBs then admins should remove them imo, or it reflects negativity on the instance.
I agree. Although each instance can run themselves as they see fit, the idea that a community is the fiefdom of the Mods seems a holdover from Reddit which was, at least until recently, almost too big to manage. I’ve been helping run online communities for a long time and when it was a forum on a site, you had a responsibility to make sure it was run as well as it could be. Lemmy feels like a return to that era.
My take is that it isn’t my instance, I run it for the users and this should apply to the Mods too.
