In my view as a long-time moderator, the purpose of moderation is conflict resolution and ensuring the sitewide rules are followed. As reported today by !vegan@lemmyworld, moderator Rooki’s vision appears to be that their personal disagreement with someone else’s position takes priority over the rules and is enough to remove comments in a community they don’t moderate, remove its moderators for the comments, and effectively resort to hostile takeover by posting their own comment with an opposing view (archived here) and elevating it for visiblity.
The removed comments relate to vegan cat food. As seen in the modlog, Rooki removed a number of pretty balanced comments explaining that while there are problematic ways to feed cats vegan, if done properly, cats can live on vegan cat food. Though it is a controversial position even among vegans, there is scientific research supporting it, like this review from 2023 or the papers co-authored by professor Andrew Knight. These short videos could also work as a TL;DR of his knowledge on the matter. As noted on Wikipedia, some of the biggest animal advocacy organizations support the notion of vegan cat food, while others do not. Vegan pet food brands, including Ami, Evolution Diet, and Benevo have existed for years and are available throughout the world, clearly not prohibited by law in countries with laws against animal abuse.
To summarize, even if you don’t agree with the position of vegan cat food being feasible, at the very least you have to acknowledge that the matter is not clear-cut. Moreover, there is no rule of lemmy.world that prohibits those types of conversations unless making a huge stretch to claim that it falls under violent content “promoting animal abuse” in the context of “excessive gore” and “dismemberment”.
For the sake of the argument, even if we assume that the truth is fully on Rooki’s side and discussions of vegan cat food is “being a troll and promoting killing pets”, the sitewide rules would have to be updated to reflect this view, and create a dangerous precedent, enabling banning for making positive comments about junk food (killing yourself), being parents who smoke (killing your kids), being religious “because it’s not scientific” and so on. Even reddit wouldn’t go that far, and there are plenty of conversations on vegan cat food on reddit.
Given Rooki’s behavior and that it has already resulted in forcing the vegan community out of lemmy.world and with more likely to follow, I believe the only right course of action is to remove them as a moderator to help restore the community’s trust in the platform and reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future.
Hi all,
For the sake of transparency, we are responding here, as remaining silent will also send a message to the community. We are actively reviewing all the information posted in this thread and all other linked sources. The entire team is being brought up to speed on the events that have taken place, but this process may take some time. We are all in different time zones, and many of us have professional and personal obligations that may take priority. Please bear with us, as there is a lot to review. We promise that after our review, we will respond to the community.
Thank you.
The FHF / LW Admin Team
Any updates or this more of a week to month wait?
Looking at the modlog, Rooki reinstated the two !vegan moderators and restored one of the mods’ comments about an hour ago. Rooki also edited their own comment referenced in the OP to say the following:
Edit: I am sorry, about my emotional decision i reinstated @Eevoltic and @[email protected] as mods After researching myself, many sites say its not healthy, one (1) research paper says it is at least NOT unhealthy, but it has few points of data.
Personally, I’m not fully satisfied if that is the end of it. The changes look like Rooki admitting that the issue is not clear-cut, but Rooki’s conduct as a moderator has to reflect the rules, not something as arbitrary as Rooki’s level of disagreement with someone’s views at the given time.
Nobody should have to convince Rooki that something is not misinformation. Rooki (or any other instance moderator) must not even think of interfering on that basis. The word “misinformation” is not in the rules in any shape or form, and the only thing remotely close to it is Lemmy.World accepting that “The content provided on Lemmy.World is not necessarily factually true”. If anything, the rules side more with the community moderators’ judgement by saying “Your participation in individual communities will only be acceptable on the condition that you abide by their rules.”
Edit: Added more to the sentence on Lemmy.World’s rule related to misinformation.
I love how this comment is how I find out what’s happened
In the absence of announcements, my understanding is that it’s highly unlikely that Rooki will be removed for the misconduct.
Firstly, it doesn’t take a team of two admins and seven moderators nearly a week to investigate a matter involving a handful of comments and six users. Secondly, if it were a broader investigation into Rooki’s overall conduct, you’d expect Rooki to at least be asked to pause their moderator activity for the duration, but Rooki continues to ban people and remove comments.
Ironically, one of the users banned by Rooki for trolling today is EndlessApollo, whose comment and subsequent ban by !vegan launched the whole chain of events.
O/U on if they actually do a statement?
More than I expected. Still wonder if they’ll actually say something
At least they admitted fault and learned a lesson.
However I’m also not adequately satisfied with this behaviour. This is an egregious example of someone not understanding how community works and then stepping in to boss them around about something they know little about.
I’m calling on the Lemmy.World team to appointment a vegan admin to oversee the community of [email protected] and for the removal of Rooki as an admin.
I’m calling on the Lemmy.World team to appointment a vegan admin to oversee the community of [email protected] and for the removal of Rooki as an admin.
I would probably consider that community lost and promote the other ones on the other instances as much as possible
However I’m also not adequately satisfied with this behaviour.
Why should we care if you or [email protected] are satisfied?
What the fuck is “vegan cat food”? I sometimes can’t understand people.
Ok. I get it. As people, we are bad. We mass husbandry just for food, modifying them with artificial selection for productivity. So I can understand veganism (although I am not vegan).
But have we really reached the point where we stop animals from eating meat? Either I’m a bigoted idiot or people are out of their minds.
Nobody is suggesting to stop animals in the wild eating meat or for incidental kills our furry companions make. Animals eat meat. It’s natural. We breed animals as pets and feed them industrial amounts of food each year that we produce from other animals in very questionable ways. Not natural. The entire planet benefits from less meat being mass produced. It’s not crazy to entertain some ideas that get us closer if they’re proven equally nutritional.
Then we should be against pets too. If we are not okay to breeding animals, we should also discuss pets too. That’s not natural either.
I’m not against befriending animals but breeding animals is shit.
There are vegans that think of pets as an abuse. I think the pet industry with breeders is abusive but making friends with an animal is mutually beneficial.
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For me, the purpose of the post is exactly what it asks for. I don’t think I’ve ever posted to !vegan except for today, to cross-post the OP, but my own fate as an active lemmy.world user likely rests on the outcome of this request. I run a tiny community that has no relation to animal rights or ethics but I feel it is absolutely threatened when there are moderators like Rooki that act based on their views rather than the rules.
That vegan community has a rule against misinformation. The idea that a cat is perfectly healthy on a vegan diet is misinformation. You feel threatened by mods like Rooki who act based on rules rather than your views. You’d rather mistreat animals than admit that anything any vegan has ever said ever might be wrong, and not allow anyone to point out that your wrong
Idk, but I personally think there doesn’t have to be a rule that explicitly states “don’t hand out misinformation that will cause animals pain”
like, if someone told someone else that “drinking polonium cures depression” we would also want that person banned, even if there isn’t a rule explicitly against it.
It is about pets, which are domestic animals who eat what you feed them. Choosing brand X of pet food prevents your pet from eating brand Y, I suppose, but every pet owner has to make such choices. Plant-based diets start to look like just another choice.
You really can’t stop cats from eating meat anyway, especially if you ever let them outside. They love to catch and eat mice, birds, and bugs, and they will do it no matter what pet food you might also give them.
I wonder if we feed our animals with “vegan food” for a year, would they start to choose that instead of meat or meat based food?
Man, I’ve had cats off and on my whole life.
You can offer kittens freshly weaned anything you want, and they’ll go after the stuff that smells right.
You can feed a cat any brand of food, and if they catch a bug or a rodent, or a bird, they may well eat it, or leave it on your pillow as a gift. Kinda rolling the dice which one tbh.
Cats are predators driven by instincts. A kitten rescued after being separated from its mother, raised by hand and then runs across something that sets off the prey drive will try to catch it. Adult cats that aren’t even hungry will engage in hunting behaviors because it just flips the right switches in their brain.
Animals? They have almost zero choice in their food. When they do have a choice, they’ll eat what smells right, and/or acts like food. You can’t train koalas to eat meat as their main diet, and you can’t train cats to not eat meat. At best, as an animal guardian, you provide them with limited choices, and they eat or starve (if the food isn’t close enough to being food for their instincts, they won’t even try to eat it).
Frankly, anyone taking a predator as a pet and not being willing to fulfill its basic needs is dumb. They’re choosing their wishes over the care of the animal, just to fulfill whatever belief it is they’re following.
You don’t want the animals in your care to not eat meat, don’t get animals that eat meat at all. No dogs, no cats, no snakes, nothing like that. Go adopt a bird that people didn’t know how to take care of and dumped at some rescue. Pick the animal companions that fit your life choices, don’t try and shoehorn yours into their existence.
In other words, vegans keeping meat eating pets are hypocrites because they’re exploiting animals for their own preferences and needs instead of the animals’
Cats (which are what all this nonsense is about) are obligated carnivores, so they’d either find meat elsewhere (and probably move to another home were they weren’t mistreated, if able) or die.
Don’t know about cats, but can answer from dog perspective - I imagine it might apply to cats as well. And this is a completely utilitarian answer: food alergies. Animals can have them.
We have a dog who is alergic to most if not all most common meat proteins - chicken, pork, beef, fish… didn’t test all but you (and we) get the picture. Luckily, there are less common meat proteins (venison as one example) which he accepts just fine - but there was a distinct possibility he would not. So we would be faced with two options - buy him super expensive, ultra processed analergic food, or go for vegan options. If faced with this decision, I’d opt for option B for sure.
I know cats are seen as true carnivores and dogs are omnivores, but I think it applies to your question
That is not correct from a cat perspective. Dogs are not obligate carnivores. Cats are. What this means is that the amino acids that cats can’t produce on their own are only available naturally from other animals. The amino acids that dogs don’t produce on their own are available from vegan sources.
And I clarified this. OP asked about animals, I have experience with dogs and acknowledged cats are different.
But I can imagine cats having similar conditions. There are always outliers and sometimes you have to do unconventional things.
People are out of their minds. It’s a cult. Thankfully, mostly constrained to the west.
I see a straw man argument.
The vegan position is that we should eliminate the use of animal products in the diets of the animals we see as companions.
Hey, check it out! I was right in thinking that the studies indicating good outcomes for the pets were poorly structured.
We found that there has been limited scientific study on the impact of vegan diets on cat and dog health. In addition, the studies that have been conducted tended to employ small sample sizes, with study designs which are considered less reliable in evidence-based practice. Whilst there have been several survey studies with larger sample sizes, these types of studies can be subject to selection bias based on the disposition of the respondents towards alternative diets
There aren’t studies saying that it is dangerous for the pets, which is a little surprising to me. Long story short the jury’s still out. But IMO it is completely fine for the admins of an instance to come down firmly against potentially animal-abusive practices, just as they would against political misinformation or nonconsensual pornography or what have you, regardless of how much in favor of those things are the members of the community promoting it.
While the study is not conclusive, that does not mean it is not a significant and useful piece of evidence. Conducted fairly and with acknowledgement of its flaws, it should be taken into account over the use of a simple classification system describing animals in their natural habitats.
I disagree that the admins should be fine coming down on anything they perceive as potentially abusive practices, as I think that sets a bad overall precedent.
Science is a continuously evolving thing, by design, and there is nothing wrong with using the best information that we have available at any given time.
I think it’s funny that the vegan mods in question pivoted effortlessly from “this is our place, fuck you, you are banned, we’ll decide what is and isn’t allowed” to “halp halp they’re censoring me, what about my human rights, you can’t do this”
I think it’s funny they thought they could censor an admin. I fully support Rooki on this.
100%
That’s the funniest part to me. Rooki was extremely evenhanded about it.
They posted misinformation,
Rooki left it up posted a counterpoint. They banned Rooki, Rooki didn’t ban them in return, just restored the counterpoint and removed their ability to ban.At no point were any of their free speech rights interfered with inany(edit: any unreasonable) way, and now they’re all butthurt that they are no longer able to censor the admins on their own instance, in service of promoting animal abuse.Good luck guys. Like I say I would look at it as a learning experience about how the world works.
(Edit: I had my chronology wrong. Rooki wasn’t the author of the initial vegan-cat-debunking comments that the !vegan mods deleted that sparked the whole thing off)
Some mods want echo chambers with false information.
I don’t want a “truth” monitor but sometimes it needs to be done.
It is different when real imminent harm to real organisms in the actual real world is involved
If someone is posting that crystals will cure your cancer, or you can feed your baby honey to build its immune system, or vegan cat food is safe, it is a good admin’s job to curtail your free speech rights unless you can demonstrate pretty convincingly that you are not the wrong one (with more than “I KNOW bro, I’m vegan, so that means I’m right and stfu”).
And doubly, triply, so if you are actively censoring people who are trying to debunk your misinformation through exercise of their own free speech.
What’s inconsistent about that? Communities have their own rules, which often are and should be much stricter than the sitewide rules. For example, a pro-Harris community may decide to ban pro-Trump posts (or vice versa) to keep it on-topic, but that wouldn’t justify a site admin removing the mods and their comments for that. Some communities exist specifically for debates, while others choose to be more of a safe space type.
Yes, and instances have their own overriding sitewide rules. Some instances exist specifically for misinformation or the encouragement of reprehensible behavior, or at least advertise themselves as a safe space for it, and some don’t.
It’s also relevant that (edit:
Rooki’sI was wrong) the community’s first reaction was the kind of reasoned discussion that some people are now saying should be the answer (as opposed to this heavy handed censorship), and then only after (edit:Rooki’s) reasoned discussion was deleted and they were banned, did they shrug their shoulders and say well if just hitting the “fuck you” button is within bounds then I’ve got one of those buttons too.I think it can be written down as a useful learning experience for the vegan club about how the world works, if they decide to learn from it.
Internet drama is nothing new. Personally I’m most interested in the accurate understanding and application of science principles along with general harm reduction, not people engaging in potential hypocrisy or pwning some vegans.
This behavior is a core flavor of Lemmy
Yep
More common, I think, than someone saying “well I opened the door to it by trying to ban them first, it’s only fair that I have to find a new instance now, that was a valuable lesson and now I understand better how it probably felt on the receiving end of the bans I was happily handing out before”
It is a vegan community, that is where vegan views should flourish. A non-vegan admin stepped in and trampled on our free speech.
Removed by mod
Let me guess you have some kind of investment into animal agriculture. As you willing to troll and make threats.
I didn’t think it needed to be spelled out, but I am not seriously suggesting doing this; I am making a particular satirical point.
If you think forcibly taking control of an organism and feeding it a diet which isn’t what it would prefer with its free will to be eating, and may not even be healthy for it, is so messed up that I shouldn’t even be joking about it, because contemplating it happening to you is horrifying, then yeah you kind of have a point and we can agree on that.
Free speech means the government doesn’t censor you, not that you get to spread harmful disinformation without consequence in a community and instance where it’s against the rules
No that’s the
2nd1st amendment of the US constitution which only protects free speech from the US government. That it is legal for private actors to censor does not mean that free speech is not being censored.Its so irrelevant as .world is not a US website.
There are more studies than just one on the topic.
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Is this all over a disagreement on whether a cat can survive on a vegan diet?
You’re not fully representing the situation. They banned vegans moderators from their own community based on their disagreement with scientific fact.
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From a strictly scientific perspective, it is inappropriate to use where something fits into a recognized classification system as some indication of broader scientific fact. That’s an oversimplification that takes what is a simple teaching tool for lower-level science education that, by necessity, smooths over the details and nuance of our actual physical world, and tries to more broadly apply it to the actual practice of the science by specialists who actually work with that detail.
You cannot actually say that because something is classified as an obligate carnivore, it must consume meat to remain healthy. The classification system is too flawed for that, and exists merely to teach some basic principles in biology to new students. Our classification systems are not based in immutable fact and intended to be the end-all-be-all for drawing conclusions. Instead they are working tools with imperfections, designed for a specific teaching and communication purpose.
The fact of the matter is that a living organism requires certain chemical inputs, and if those inputs are provided, it can potentially remain healthy. If we simplified this down to some carnivorous bacterium, I think you could see a little more easily how we can very likely engineer around any classification of obligate carnivorousness if we so desired. It’s classification would not necessarily be accurate as described anymore, though that would not mean we should necessarily discard the system when it still serves a useful purpose for analyzing animals living within their natural habitats.
Thank you for your service.
Feeding your cat an artificial diet because of your own conviction is animal abuse. At a minimum it needs access to both vegan and carnivorous food, and make the choice itself.
Are there any cats in the wild that are vegan?
Are there any cats in the wild that are vegan?
No, because they must have meat to survive due to being obligate carnivores. This is different than dogs, which are omnivores.
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Feeding your cat an artificial diet because of your own conviction is animal abuse.
“Artificial” gotta use the nature logical fallacy there huh. Kibble isn’t natural.
Plant-based kibble synthesized with taurine, b12 and vitamin a through reputable kibble can be just as tasty to a cat and research has shown cats on a plant-based diet are actually healthier.
Read the studies before you make emotional statements.
-https://sustainablepetfood.info/
-https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
-https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
-https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
For one, I don’t see the moderators “denying any risks”. The very first one seen at the archived link and in the mod log says “There are some scammy and not nutritionally complete vegan cat foods or there, so it’s important to do a bit of extra research”.
Regardless of any of that, the job of an instance moderator isn’t to fight what they believe is misinformation, as that view leads to total censorship, as I already explained. What if you believe that abortion kills? Would you then go and remove moderators that say otherwise? The same question stands for the other examples provided in my OP.
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Yes, i wouldnt even stepped in if they didnt removed / added a warning about the risks of a vegan diet.
As a “clean” vegan diet without anything added to the food is poison for the cat as they are “Obligatory Carnivore” and need some Animal Proteins.
They wouldnt die immediatly but will cause malnutrition.
Wtf is a “clean” vegan diet?
Technically it’s not proteins, but specific amino acids (which, yes, are the building blocks of proteins). And amino acid deficiencies will absolutely kill cats. Many years ago my parents used to buy the cheapest garbage cat food available at the local grocery store. It was nutritionally deficient, and ended up killing our only cat that was strictly an indoor cat at the time. (I don’t allow any of my cats outside, because I don’t want them to be food for owls and coyotes.)
Yes
That is my understanding based on Rooki’s own post, the post of the demoted vegan mod, and the modlog containing the removed comments.
Here’s the thread (archive link) that the admin intervened in:
@[email protected], cats CAN NOT survive for long with a vegan diet. Its dangerous for them. Cats are carnivores.
Please refrain from removing warnings about such dangerous facts. Everyone who killed their cats by doing so, have a nice rest of your life knowing you killed your loved pet.
p.s. yes i am a cat owner.
Edit: to the rest of the mods: Dont promote harmfull things for pets. @[email protected] and @Eevoltic are demoted.
If anyone else thinks pets should be vegan i have no problem banning them for being a troll and promoting killing pets.
Just that you heard it from me too: YES cats can survive vegan diet for few months but prolonged exposure and it gets harmful for the pet and even death.
Edit: This was in-between the comments by @[email protected] being removed/restored
Also to add Rooki is an admin of LemmyWorld.
I’m just here for the comments.
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I’m much uglier than that.
I am agog to learn that someone thinks what someone else thinks about what someone else feeds their cat is important.
What’s your views on ASPCA/SPCA?
What the hell. There’s just a disagreement, no need to use admin override powers. Just let it be. Let them have their sub. It’s not like they’re recruiting for Al Qaeda.
I really don’t give a damn about this particular fight about cat food. But I do worry about admins or mods who can’t sometimes just let something slide. Like cops always looking to escalate
The list of people upvoting this comment makes for fascinating reading
On lemmy we don’t see who upvotes or downvotes
Some of us do; Lemmy doesn’t display votes except to certain users, but that doesn’t make Lemmy votes private. Discussion here. PieFed apparently has a technique for keeping your votes actually private (mostly) from even the platforms that do display them.
I fully support an admin stepping in to stop poorly researched pseudo science with an aura of fake legitimacy to be spread on Lemmy as a whole although I don’t use (dot)World I still see your shit on my feed
I haven’t looked into this (nor will I), but if the situation is as described, I support revoking mod access. Let’s not discuss veganism, pet food, or other off-topic issues. The discussion is about mod behavior on Lemmy. If anyone wants to check user Rose’s claims and show up with receipts, that’d be appreciated, I think, by all.
This seems to be a situation where an instance admin (not a community moderator) stepped into a community ([email protected]), removed a bunch of “disinformation” comments, and de-modded some moderators who were letting the “disinformation” by. At issue was whether it is safe to feed cats a vegan diet. I did have to look into veganism and pet food to make sense of that. If there is universal agreement among scientists, veterinarians, and non-crazy vegans that any cat put on a vegan diet dies within 3 months, that’s one thing, but the actual situation doesn’t seem that severe. Rooki also seems to use non-standard terminology and incomplete descriptions in communicating their side of the issue.
Wikipedia’s obligate carnivore section says (emphasis added):
Obligate or “true” carnivores are those whose diet requires nutrients found only in animal flesh in the wild… All wild felids, including feral domestic cats, require a diet of primarily animal flesh and organs… In captivity or domestic settings, obligate carnivores like cats and crocodiles can in principle get all their required nutrients from processed food made from plant and synthetic sources.[4][5]
Reference 4 above is a Guardian article titled Cats may get health benefits from vegan diet, study suggests and subtitled “Owners who fed their pet a plant-based diet reported fewer visits to the vet and less medication use”.
Rooki uses the term “obligatory carnivore” (instead of the usual “obligate”) and omits that the definition describes the diet only of wild animals, not captive ones. So Rooki’s familiarity with this topic seems limited, and yet they use their admin flag to shut down discussion doesn’t fit their opinion. Wikipedia’s eponym for this type of participant is “Randy in Boise.”
If this were a dispute between !vegan mods then that would be regular mod drama, but this seems to be from outside the community, not good. While Reddit often has bad moderators on large subs, one of its attractions to many users is unless you’re discussing criminal or near-criminal conduct, you can generally start your own sub and moderate it however you want, with the admins staying out of your hair. The times they banned some subs that didn’t reach that level created significant controversy even by non-supporters of those subs. If Lemmy is trying to present itself as an attractive alternative to Reddit, it should also take a light hand with internal community matters.
Overall I think it is best that instance admins stop interfering with discussions inside communities, unless there are serious conflicts with site policy. Could we imagine lemmy.world defederating another instance because its vegan community had a comment subthread about feeding a plant diet to your cat? Maybe so, but that doesn’t speak well of lemmy.world, imho. Alternatively, if such discussions get shut down on lemmy.world but wouldn’t get a different instance defederated, then lemmy.world stops being the “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use” that it advertises itself as. So it should leave those discussions alone, both on the local instance and on remote ones.
I won’t weigh in on the request for Rooki’s removal but I’d want Rooki and other admins to step away from this type of action, and I’d want the site poilcy (written or unwritten) to generally embrace this non-interference principle.
WP:UNINVOLVED is an internal Wikipedia policy about admin actions and as such, doesn’t directly apply here, but it is something to consider in deciding how best to handle these issues.
an instance admin (not a community moderator) stepped into a community (!vegan), removed a bunch of “disinformation” comments
Is this true? I thought Rooki just posted a counterpoint, not removed anything. Maybe I am wrong.
Edit: I am wrong. !vegan mods did initiate the comment-removal-war, but it wasn’t comments of Rooki’s that they were deleting.
Check the modlogs before you speak
Quite right.
- Someone posted that a vegan diet is ok for cats
- Someone else posted that no the fuck it isn’t
- !vegan mod removed the previous post
- Admin (presumably Rooki) restored the deleted comment and deleted comments that a vegan diet is ok for cats
- Mod flipped the polarity of the deletions back again, and banned Rooki
- Rooki unbanned themselves, flipped the polarity back again (so now it’s only the anti-vegan-cat comments)
So I was wrong, I think. The !vegan mods did delete some of the debunking first, but it wasn’t from Rooki. I think.
Also, it’s still going on; the mods are as of a few hours ago still undeleting vegan-cat advocacy comments and banning people who disagree with them.
I haven’t checked the logs myself but am going by the initial post, some of the comments, and a similar thread on !vegan itself.
What is with this? Why can’t people be level headed and chill? Good god, people need to seriously touch some grass.
Make a community on a instance that doesn’t metamoderate. You might have to start your own instance.
The topic of discussion should be more about the Lemmy World admins being biased and overstepping their boundaries. You wouldn’t suggest that minorities should just create their own country when they’re being oppressed by the majority.
However this is precisely why the instances veganism social, vegan theory club and lemmy.vg exist.
However this is precisely why the instances veganism social, vegan theory club and lemmy.vg exist.
Off-topic question: are there any reasons for 3 instances to exist, instead of having a co-managed single instance?
Veganism Social covers Mastodon. While VeganTheoryClub.org and Lemmy.vg have different approaches towards the vegan topic on Lemmy.
VeganTheoryClub.org has an anarchist theme.
Thanks!
Niemöller.txt
vegantheoryclub.org is a vegan run instance that was created pretty much precisely because of shit like this.
I think it’s worth communicating how this admin is using their powers, and to other people that the vegan community was taken over by an anti-vegan carnist for personal reasons. So that users can make up their minds over where they want to participate.
Outside of that I don’t really care, I’m not optimistic they’ll be reigned in and think lemmy.world is not a very well run server for reasons like this.
Yeah, but one of the admins there is the same way, and has directly used his admin position to ban people from the communities there based on unrelated matters on other instances. Hamid is worse than what this post is about.
Without evidence this is just slander /shrug
Although personally depending on the context I don’t see an issue. Like if I go make a bunch of horrible, racist, “jokes” on shitposting or whatever and the beehaw admins ban my account from their server pre-emptively as I’m not of the character they want because of their bee kind policy. That seems… fine?
I can always make another account I behave in line with their goals on to participate in their server.
Well, since I’m one is the people, and you can look up where a person has been banned, and any given reason given by the moderator, slander is bullshit. I don’t need to provide proof, it’s there, for anyone to see.
The context is that I expressed my personal difficulty in my belief in the necessity of police reform while knowing some police officers that are actively working for change. This was a comment on the weedtime C/. Weedtime had no rules against discussion of such things at the time.
Hamid responded with a single image, and threw in the ACAB thing. I responded with a relaxed and friendly comment about my personal difficulties, and Hamid responded with “bootlicker”.
I was then banned from weedtime.
I asked why via message, and got banned from other C/s on his instance where he and I had interacted previously. then I told him to fuck himself.
after that, rules got changed on weedtime.
This wasn’t some kind of rude joke, it wasn’t off topic, and there was no attempt to make me aware that there were unwritten rules.
Again, unless there’s some way an admin can remove the information, the bans and the reasons given are available publicly. When I looked last, it was something along the lines of cop lover or bootlicker given as the reason for the ban.
So there it is, the context.
Edit: and a partial screen shot of the actions taken. It was cop lover given as the reason. And then the bans from unrelated C/s. Which is plenty of evidence the guy isn’t a good mod by itself.
idk man I went through the modlog and you kinda seem like a shithead. You admit to trolling vegans, you post some pretty ridiculous stuff, and go around explaining to vegans how to be vegan while saying that you aren’t going to be one. It’s kinda not really making your “I’m an innocent little user who was unjustly banned” case. It looks like maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back so to speak.
Luckily, your opinion of me isn’t important.
And, it’s not relevant to hamid’s actions within that circumstance, which is what this exchange of comments is about.
Go scroll back through my user history and find the comments that set hamid off. that’s the point.
I’m a well known asshole. And, if hamid had used that as a reason, I might even agree with that decision. But he didn’t. He made a decision as a moderator, then carried that decision over to his own instance based on someone not saying things the way he wanted them said. It wasn’t even about disagreeing over the principle, it was me not saying that ACAB, no matter what, and nothing else ever needs to be said.
every interaction I had with hamid previous to that had been friendly, and unless those have been removed from the C/s by him, they’re still there to see.
Remember, this conversation started based on the idea that hamid’s instance was an example of a better administrated instance.
Now, if you wanna make the conversation about your opinion of me, might as well bugger off because idgaf. You’d be wasting time. I’d just block you and go about my life. What I wouldn’t do is arbitrarily ban you from C/s I moderate. Because that’s the kind of action that the post and thread is actually about.
Again, if you wanna dig back a month for the comments, feel free. You can judge them however you wish, and idgaf if you even come back and have the same opinion of me. But that is still tangential at best to the point I made. Attacking me based on other circumstances doesn’t change the fundamental statement that the admin of vegantheory has done the exact kind of thing that the post is about.
Considering how you responded in this thread. I have lost my interest in engaging with you.
This is the default way admins behave. If you haven’t noticed it yet, that’s just you’re good fortune.
I am an eternal optimist in my beliefs of human goodness and social ingenuity.
That’s great, I’ve no I’ll will towards you.
Imo the goodness of Lemmy comes from self assembly, and that admins have no ability to trap you, in the way users were on Reddit. The goodness is leaving.
Stop whining that people don’t approve of you abusing your pets. Rooki did nothing wrong, they’re just fighting vegan disinformation that harms pets
While I agree that the behavior was problematic, I personally think a mature apology and acknowledgement that the science is not necessarily on his side would be a sufficient resolution, if it was offered openly and willingly.
Animal welfare is an understandably passionate topic, so I can empathize with a person’s feelings leading them to decide that what they were doing was necessary to protect the animals that they care about. Because the fundamental motive was a positive one, and only the chosen expression of this motive was poor conduct, I think redemption is a potentially viable path forward that may be preferable to harsher consequences. We could see this as an educational and growing opportunity, if we wished, and forgiveness has merits of its own when there is no genuine malice present.
I should probably disclose that I am not a member of that community, so I personally was not impacted by these actions and may be underestimating just how badly people feel about this all. Being myself an active carnivore that has been vegetarian in the past (well, pescatarian tbf) and having experience with both schools of thought though, I do feel like I can appreciate the thought-patterns that led both sides to their chosen actions.
When it comes to disagreements of that nature (and again, even if we assume that the science were on Rooki’s side), the right course of action in my view is to make an opposing comment and make your case, then if that’s unfairly removed by the community mods, create your own community (it could be another version of vegan or “anti-vegan” depending on where you stand) and use that to express the opposing views. Resorting to your admin power is completely unacceptable for a case of disagreement that is not related to a rules violation.
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You’ve got to be joking
CMV: behind "the_donald” subs, the next worst community to engage with is vegans. And as a Linux user, there’s not a shortage of trash communities I could have chosen from.
I hear chuds bitching about vegans way more than I the opposite.
I’m not even vegan or vegetarian, but the amount of bullshit whining and jokes about vegans by dipshits online is so fucking annoying.
I swear it’s a psy-op by big beef lol
Vegans are the second most hated group after people with substance disorders in the United States.
The bigotry towards either group is completely nonsensical as they’re often been misunderstood by the general public because the mainstream media is failing to properly cover them to favour the viewpoints of animal agriculture and the war on drugs.
I ask you to listen to these people directly about their stories.
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You better not talk to your mother with that mouth.
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Rooki needs to held accountable for being subjective and for an abuse of power.
To what account? They are an instance admin, everyone is below them.
I’m not siding with anyone in this case, but the fact is it is a core feature of the fediverse: admins rule supreme and are only accountable to other admins. If users or communities don’t like it, they could, and SHOULD move to another instance. If a suitable one is not available, they should make their own, and rule it as they please.
Going by this Lemmy.World chart, Rooki is an instance moderator standing below @[email protected] and @[email protected], so I’m appealing to them in the form of a public post so that the issue can’t be swept under the rug.
If users or communities don’t like it, they could, and SHOULD move to another instance.
!vegan are already going for that option, but the problem is that if your written rules do not reflect your actual practices, it’s a lot like backstabbing because you invite people to build communities over time only to go back on your rules and force the users to migrate, which leads to fragmentation and a lot of members lost in the process.
Just wanted to mention we are still working on a official response.
Agree, great points.
I’m chiming in in this thread in a pretty anti authority way because I’ve experienced issues with admins on several instances doing just as you say: not playing by the rules they have laid out.
It’s frustrating but ultimately it’s their house. We’re just squatting.
I’m seconding this motion.
It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t try to improve their original Lemmy home before moving to other instances.
There’s nothing to prove. It’s in their nature.
This is like the scorpion and the frog story.
