I created this post on my local server, calling for what I thought was reasonable action against a self-proclaimed threat to Canada.
Someone in the community disagreed (fine), and reported the post on their hosting instance (lemmy.world), which led to an immediate deletion of the post (on that single instance only).
Think is, I really don’t feel that it was warranted - and neither do most of the community members over on lemmy.ca.
I realize that instances are autonomous, but is there an appeal process to potentially have this reinstated?
On the one hand, CBSA and CSIS are both charged with keeping undesirable people out of the country - and someone who stands so strongly against the values that Canada has embraced in law and policy is an exact definition of undesirable to Canada, in my mind.
I didn’t call for brigading (essentially spamming), I called on people who felt the same to let the enforcement agencies know how they felt.
But far more importantly, an admin (not even a mod) on lemmy.world made a judgement call about my post and decided to remove it because of their opinion - NOT because it violated that instance’s rules or any laws that I’m aware of.
Because of an admin’s personal judgement, people on lemmy.world now have a different view of [email protected] than the actual tone and content on the hosting instance. This puts the admin in the role of moral gatekeeper, which seems like an extremely bad precedent to set.
If all instances were equal, this would hurt lemmy.world far more than it would hurt any others including lemmy.ca; but all instances are NOT equal, and lemmy.world maintains the majority of all users worldwide.
The deeper I look into this, the more I think that this type of behaviour is profoundly harmful to the entire Lemmy community.
As far as it being “just one admins opinion”, I really doubt that. There are back channels for communication at the mod level and at the admin level and I see requests for comments all the time.
In fact, I had one of my own where a user flooded a channel with 19 posts at once, so I went to the other mods going “You know, TECHNICALLY, we don’t have a rule against this, what does everybody think?”
We, collectively, decided, yeah, on that channel? 10 posts a day is fine. We didn’t want a single voice guiding submissions.
OTOH, we didn’t retroactively REMOVE anything, it was just posted as a note “going forward…”
But anyway, the point is there are layers of communication between mods and admins you aren’t aware of.
Appreciate the clarification - and it’s good to know that it’s likely a collective action, rather than individual.
But there’s a fundamental difference - two really - between the example you give, and my post. In your case, it was behaviour (channel flooding) that was the problem; in my case, it was the content of a post that the admins objected to, even though it didn’t violate any rules on the originating instance and community, nor on this instance - nor did it run afoul of the intent of the rules, as far as I can see.
It was strictly a case of the admins deciding “we don’t like that post” and removing it. They became content gatekeepers - honestly, de facto moderators on their own instance.
If the admins don’t like a community from an instance, they should be free to block the community or defederate with the instance entirely; but filtering content based on their view of what they think should be allowed in the community is…
Yeah, it’s just not right. It’s harmful to the community as a whole, and disproportionately harmful to communities on other instances.