this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Wow, what the heck happened? Do we know the dev's lemmy username for any clues?
Yes, I posted his message in my post's body. https://dubvee.org/post/3788765
Thanks for that context.
The specific "burned out" is a common killer among folks that try this: community management
"Well, two years in, and I cannot say this place is any better, just differently bad if not worse. Too many people here seem to think that because it's not "corpo social media" that anything goes, and boy do some people really run with that."
I can't say I blame them. People can be horrible. Managing a community also means managing the worst of people. I had a former employer that did community management of a dating site. The level of mental trauma the front line workers endured was more than I could imagine. This is also why I completely understand instance admins that follow an aggressive blocking/banning approach. Beehaw put up tall walls and defederated aplenty. Blahaj.zone actively bans based upon user activity that is even on other unrelated instances. I can't fault either of these approaches because the alternative is dealing with the worst users en masse.
I hope that instance owner/manager gets some of that much deserved rest.
Apparently, reading the details on there - he might not shut it down.
You might have read it in reverse? He started by asking for help from additional admins, then switched to wanting to shut it down and just be done with the Fediverse completely.
If he comes back, it will be on Beehaw or some such.
He had changed his position after I wrote that comment I believe.
The edits may be confusing but the changed part was put above rather than below:
So while below one of the horizontal line separators he asks for help (then crosses out that text), above he adds:
Sounds like someone wasn't prepared for the reality of human interaction on the internet.
I mean its completely fair to say that they don't want to deal with it, but also what did they expect?
I totally have to disagree. Instance owners are attacked here on Lemmy for trying to keep their instance in line with the local laws where they live. You know, which they totally have to keep free of legal trouble that might cost them a lot of time, money or even put them into jail. It's not great when admins have to deal with utter idiots in their free time. Remember the whole Nicole fiasco where some poor girl was harassed via a spam attack? Remember that spam attack with the scat porn? All this hate going around with the war in the middle east? I can totally understand why someone burns out dealing with this crap in their free time. Come home from work after a hard day. Another scat spam attack you have to deal with. Another Hamas sympathizer calling you genocide lover because you deleted his propaganda. Someone else attacking you because you removed content that is illegal where you live and you hope that no authority saw it before you deleted it. Go to bed. Go to work. Repeat.
Since you're on the same instance as me, I assume you are a mod/admin there. Let me use this opportunity to say thank you to you and all the other mods on feddit.org for helping to keep that place one of the most pleasant online spaces I've come across in my years on the internet. As far as I can tell from the outside you and the others are doing a great job.
I'm not a mod there, but thank you :)
Oh, I totally read that as you talking from experience :)
Or do you mod somewhere else?
Post your thank you message to
!main@feddit.org
I am sure feddit.org admins/mod and other relevant people will love this.
A bit offtopic, but why would anyone want to keep their instance in line with local laws? Aren't internet sites operating under jurisdiction of where they are hosted? Or is it just some coincidence that those people decided to host their stuff at datacenters at their local proximity? When I'm choosing hosting the first thing I think about: "hmmm I shouldn't host in country where I live because I don't want to ever have any problem with local authorities, and if I host elsewhere authorities there won't be able to reach me physically so the worst thing that could happen is the site gets shut down".
There are multiple reasons: If you want to fund your instance by donations, you need to be able to act under your real name. You might get away with a totally anonymous instance which you are funding via cryptodonations and which you are hosting at a provider who really does not care about KYC, but that is also illegal in many jurisdictions. There is totally a case for a lemmy instance admin to be known publically, to be able to interact with the community in person, to be able to go to meetups or to be able to give talks at conventions.
And if you are not living in some country with totally crazy politics, most local laws are totally fine. Do not post hardcore pornography. Do not spread hatred or calls for murder and hate speach. Keep the piracy a little bit less obvious. Don't allow hardcore pornography and have a solid process to keep child porn from your platform. That might be different if you're living in Iran, Saudi-Arabia or Afghanistan, but in a western country it is totally ok to be in line with local laws.
We arent really in disagreement tho. I am absolutely empathetic with their situation and their burnout. Im just saying they should have seen it coming. Those two things arent contradictory. I just find it odd how one can invest so much time into a public project, without being aware of the realities of having to moderate it. Im thankful for the people that host instances, but i will never do it, because i know how much of a pain it is.
Not sure if "they should have seen it coming" really is the way to think about this. Yes, moderation is hard. Yes, it makes sense to build a team doing moderation. But let's be honest, Lemmy is insaner than other forums due to its federated structure.
They absolutely saw it coming - and have been continually posting about it for several years now. This was an experiment, and he is saying that it has now finally failed - not that after multiple years on Lemmy that it finally dawned on him that people can be mean on the internet.
In his latest message he even goes into some depth as to why it failed: it used to be containable, but after lemm.ee's shutting, all those trolls shifted over to other instances, and he simply does not have the heart to try and figure out which spammers and such that used to have one name (that he had blocked so their messages did not appear on his instance) now have an entirely different, unrelated name but are still up to their old tricks.
Which is important considering that he lives in the USA and could be carted off in a van someday without warning, just for the extremist leftist content that he chooses to host on the machine registered to his irl name (even if deriving from an outside source - but they will not care about that, only that Dear Leader's name has been besmirched).
If you don’t want to be called a genocide lover, then don’t defend a genocide and then double down on it.
Easy.
Can I ask you what the worst examples of community management looks like? As in, what do you believe would be the worst part of the job?
When you moderate a platform that the public is free to upload anything to, you will see everything. From insults to threats to gore to CSAM. Thats how the internet is. That is the worst part in my opinion, because you cant just look away, but actually have to deal with it.
I agree with you. However, I don't think most people understand that. For most folks they haven't been exposed to the most mentally darkest souls among us.
This really is a complicated problem, but if the fediverse wants to grow without relying on slave labor for moderation like Meta and the rest, then we have to find ways to lighten the load on moderators. Thats why creating transparent pre moderation tools like the image scanners used by many fediverse instances is so important.
Are there any moderation tool projects going on right now one could throw a few bucks at to support it?
PieFed has a number of features designed to democratize moderation - e.g. keyword filtering (allowing users to filter All, None, and even just Some content, of e.g. Musk or Trump or USA) facilitates individual end-users to curate their experiences so that mods don't have to be as aggressive at removing things.
Another cool feature is the user icons - like a brand-new account on the Fediverse gets an icon next to their name, as too does someone who receives let's say >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or a potential unregistered bot account that posts 10x more often but never replies to comments. These icons don't remove content like a moderator would, just label it so you can choose to use that knowledge however you wish.
Another one is that people looking for a less controversial discussion environment can auto-hide or even auto-remove content from your feed - I have these turned off but if someone would be offended easily and want not to see things that are heavily downvoted, they have this option. Here it is the combination of the entire community and the end user deciding their personal tolerance threshold that decides what content appears in someone's feed. There are also options to use "community members only" votes, to help separate drive-by votes from people who have not joined the community and were just scrolling All, e.g. for polls and such.
Oh yeah, PieFed has polls. Also flairs - both user and post. And categories of communities that are user customizable and shareable. It has a ton of new features, both related and unrelated to community moderation. Check it out!
This one is a very basic CSAM scanner that goes through lemmy image storage and just deletes stuff it deems bad. https://github.com/db0/fedi-safety I havent tried it tho, so i cant attest to its quality.
Im sure there are tools made for mastodon too, since it has a lot more users.
thats why the bigger platforms resorted to using ai overmoderation to deal with these.
I managed a forum for a decade, and seen everything except CSAM. You just delete it.
It was on a .tk domain and it got suspended for content violations anyway