As a moderator myself, it’s a pretty thankless job. It’s a bit like being a politician in that no matter what you do, there are lots of people that are going to hate you.
My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama | Kev Quirk
Submitted 23 hours ago by rglullis@communick.news to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://kevquirk.com/blog/my-thoughts-on-the-fosstodon-drama
Comments
Ulrich@feddit.org 21 hours ago
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 7 hours ago
Thank you for your service o7
comfy@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community’s values – their community won’t have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn’t pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.
Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called “janitors” on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It’s a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.
rglullis@communick.news 20 hours ago
I have to ask, then: what motivates people to do it?
If mods are not financially compensated for it, the only rational explanation is that they are either getting some form of benefit (soft power, access to privileged information) or they are getting some pleasure out of it, i.e, power tripping.
JoeTheSane@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Let’s please not forget that some people donate time and money because it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 16 hours ago
Funny how some people expose their own sad world views by projecting it onto others 😅
Some people chose to do the right things because they are right, not because they benefit from them.
deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It’s easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they’re basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.
comfy@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.
One example of a community I became a moderator for was one which often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted.
So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 15 hours ago
You can do things because you want to make a difference. A good difference. Not everything has to have an ulterior motive.
iopq@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I moderate a privacy community because they were looking for mods. I just delete spam from time to time
Ulrich@feddit.org 20 hours ago
Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.
But for others, I’m sure they just enjoy having a community. Some of them might also just not care what the naysayers say.
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 23 hours ago
Feel like Im missing a lot of context.
rglullis@communick.news 22 hours ago
AFAIK, it goes something like this:
- One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.
- Someone on Mastodon found “bad” posts from said moderator.
- The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.
- The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.
- Regardless of actions and reactions, the mob now successfully tainted the name and reputation of the instance.
- Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.
- One of fosstodon’s admins (the author of the blog post) is now saying “Screw you guys, I’m going
hometo Bluesky”
MysticKetchup@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
- One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.
For clarity’s sake, the views the mod expressed were:
- Calling criticism of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and transfer to Louisiana “yellow journalism” for using the phrase "disappeared"
- Defending the striking down of a school privacy policy that requires teachers get consent from LGBTQ+ kids before outing them to their parents
- Removing posts about surveillance of LGBTQ+ people in r/privacy for contradictory or unexplained reasons
- The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.
Is all criticism now a “mob” just because they don’t want people with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views to have the power to censor others?
- The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.
From what I saw, the admins actually said that they were fine with keeping him on the moderation team and the mod deleted their own accounts
- Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.
Are they? The most I saw was that people were considering leaving because other instances were going to start blocking Fosstodon
What is with the concealing and downplaying of the mod’s views and then exaggerating the “outrage” of the “mob”? Yes the Fediverse can be drama-prone but most of the fanning of the flames seems to be coming from the people complaining about Fedi users genuine criticisms of the mods/admins on Fosstodon
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to remove mod privileges for these kinds of views if you’re trying to run an inclusive space. There’s supported suspicion that they’ve used their mod powers to censor information on minorities already, just because they haven’t done it yet on this platform doesn’t mean you let them lie in wait to do it. Makes me worry that Fosstodon admins don’t see any issues keeping someone like that around
Would this get the same kind of backlash had the mod been kicked out for tankie views?
veniasilente@lemm.ee 22 hours ago
So, the usual “on the Fediverse you shalln’t be anything less than immaculately perfect” crap?
reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
- The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.
My understanding was that this mod’s accounts disappeared from everywhere (including Reddit), not just Fosstodon. So, I think they deleted their accounts themselves to avoid the backlash or something.
Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
Some kind of mod drama
In recent days, there has been a minor furor across the fediverse related to one of the moderators at fosstodon
From the link in the link
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 22 hours ago
We just can’t have nice things…
poVoq@slrpnk.net 16 hours ago
Ugh, the comments here are so full of BS and distortions of what really happened 🤦
So here is the actual tl;dr: Some people asked the main Fosstodon admins what they think about having an openly Trump supporting, islamo- and transphobic moderator in their team and their response was “not here on Fosstodon and not our problem”.
That is pretty much like this scenario: lets say you get (credibly) informed about someone openly corrupt in your organization. If your response is: I have not seen them steal money in our organization and our processes should prevent any theft happening, then you are missing the forest for the trees.
If an organization can’t get such basic governance issues right and prefers to hide behind a “neutral” stance on something that is really concerning to a large percentage of their members than they irrevocably lose a lot of trust and that is more than justified.
mrsingh@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Thanks