In the runup to the 2024 US election, there was an article about a dramatic surge in voter registrations just as Biden stepped out and Kamala replaced him. I posted it to !notvoting@slrpnk.net and it got removed. Censorship was a dick move and an abuse of power, but at least the mod DMed me to explain why. Most mods are not decent enough to make their censorship transparent.
His rationale was to claim irrelevance to the topic.
Of course, that’s nonense. Voting and not voting are both relevant to communities about voting and not voting. To a “not voting” community, a surge in voter registrations is “bad news” but it’s still relevant news. I said that to the mod, to which there was no response.
It is a manipulated scenario of controlling the narrative. Making sure that only one viewpoint is represented to the point of blocking relevant news from reputable news sources (and discussion thereof).
I did not even write a comment in favor of or against… I simply linked the article. The mod was simply angry at facts.
I frankly don’t get this community. For a not voting community there sure only talk about this!
I’d say having more people vote could be a topic to discuss there, but if the mods don’t agree, there’s not much you can do. Wouldn’t say it’s censorship, maybe they just want to promote not voting or something, which is, yea, a kind of censorship
I would advise against participating in communities that are biased towards one side, the other, not voting at all…
Indeed. This community (!modabuse_powertrip@lemmybefree.net) is intended to document these cases so people can be informed of where to avoid. It’s a shame it’s so ad hoc though. Only 28 subscribers here, so most people subscribing to communities controlled by abusive mods will remain unaware. It’s another Lemmy oversight. Ideally the modlog would link to relevent whistle-blowing.
In principle, it would be useful to have some kind of integration between these reports and the Lemmyverse dataset, because that is a neutral place where people search for communities.
I don’t think this will ever happen. The Lemmy devs seem to go away from moderation transparency by wanting to completely hide mod identities in modlog afaik (they also never fixed the feature), and that would expose them even more. A lot of people hate .ml
That would be nice. I believe dbzero made some sort of trust chain which could go well with this, but the main problem is they’re at the top of this chain, and they’re also not perfect. If they don’t like you for any reason, they can remove you in a click. This sucks.
I guess a federated comment section for instances and community could be cool. Don’t know how that can be achieved well though.
And yea, this community being on a niche instance, there’s not a lot of people here. How did you find this community by the way?
I am certainly aware of that. The Lemmy devs censored one of my posts in one of my own communities, gave false reasoning, then deleted their action from the modlog itself to coverup the embarrassment. I cannot think of a more perverse abuse than what came from Lemmy devs. These are the same people that hard-coded a slur filter. Any pro-transparency change would have to be a fork of Lemmy, like Lenny (if that’s still around).
I harvest Lemmyverse, lemmy-federate, and fediverser into a local db. Then I have script that does SQL searches on the combined dataset which then downranks Cloudflare instances as well as instances with disproportionate user counts (more than 2 standard deviations above the mean). Basically, I nix the centralised nodes and just look at properly decentralised results.
It’s cool that you went this far to build cool scripts for your usage of Lemmy
Lemmyverse is a great website
It’s unfortunately the same for piefed. Even worse, they put a CPU intensive filter for images just to check if they’re 4chan screenshots, and lowers your reputation if you engage with such content.
This is specifically piefed.social, not piefed as a whole. Other instances will have different policies.
I mean it’s hardcoded into the project. The main dev did that.
You can now disable it, but when it was introduced, this wasn’t a possibility. They basically made it seem like their opinion is the truth, when it’s not
Right, it was once unable to be disabled. But now it is. I’m aware of Piefeds history on this. I don’t get the huge deal when analysing Piefed instances in general.
The fact that it happened is a red flag to me
Putting purely subjective judgments like this, wanting to categorize a category of people as bad just because you don’t like the same humor than them is wild
I don’t believe people hosting piefed instances are culprit of that. Same goes for Lemmy which is worse.
I criticize the developing choices and the people behind the project, not its users
If they do have this enabled, then I can better evaluate whether I like this instance or not. Same goes for modlog transparency, admin policy…