this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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I haven't kept up with the drama over the course of the day, but I'm going to do my best to explain what I saw.
The old 196 mods moved off of blahaj to lemmy.world and many people have a problem with lemmy.world and how they moderate. I, for example, moved here when a mod was removing comments about Luigi and used their religion as a reason (only God can judge). There was a lot of blowback because comments were removed quite regularly for celebrating violence, or even just for posting news about the CEO being killed, which seemed like overstepping (especially when paired with the above.)
But it goes further, because the .world admins recently kicked up some more drama and caused at least one active community to go dark when the admins told the moderators that they were going to be forced to engage with the people they were moderating, regardless of whether it was most logical to simply remove a comment or not. The exact terminology from the admins to the mods was that they were going to have to allow some "flat earth" comments, and they couldn't simply remove them or ban the commenters, despite the appropriateness of such comments for the community. This made some moderators feel unsupported, and some users feel nervous that they would have to endure nazis and stuff. (To be clear, none of this is conjecture; these are things I've seen users say literally. I am too lazy to go hunting so if you want evidence you'll have to do that yourself.)
There's been dustups at lemmy.world for a little while now. It certainly doesn't help that they're such a large instance, that they attract all manner of element. But not everyone wants to, or feels the need to entertain every troll they meet.
So when the 196 mods announced that they were moving to lemmy.world, some people were mad. The reasons varied. Some people were upset that the mods made this decision unilaterally without involving the community. Some people don't trust the .world admins, some people feel like it allows known trolls to reenter the community, but the reason I saw most was that people who find blahaj to be a comfortable, welcoming, safe place didn't want to go somewhere bigger and altogether more "open."
If somebody can do a better job or link to a post that explains all this, I'd be grateful. I have a dry socket from a wisdom teeth extraction so I am out of my mind on pain killers and shouldn't have attempted this comment.
To expand, the admin basically said "people, you need to make accounts on this instance so you don't miss reports!". The mods then didn't. The admin said "do your job or I'll have to do it to keep moderation up". The mods didn't. So the admin did some mod work, and the mods cried that they were being interfered with.
Their solution was to pack up their community and all their users and leave, and to lock the community so nobody else could use it.
And the users mostly considered themselves not the property of the moderators