TL;DR: We tried to move the community because of moderatorial concerns, but fumbled how we went about doing so.
First and Foremost:
We’d like to formally apologize for springing this on you all out of nowhere, and for taking so long to respond to the backlash. With retrospect, we understand that we should have notified you all beforehand to create an opportunity to give us feedback. We understand that a lot of respect and trust was lost, and we expect it’ll take a lot of work and a lot of time before we can earn it back, but we would be grateful if y’all gave us that chance.
What happened, and why?
The primary issue that incited this was because we don’t fully agree with the admin’s moderation policies. By and large they do a great job and align with us on mod actions, but there have been several cases where we strongly disagreed, and our choices were overruled.
For example, 2 months ago, Kolanaki reached out to us via email and said they were banned from 196 for “playing the victim” and asked us why we banned him, but we didn’t. Moss talked to them and realized that the ban was unjust after reviewing the comment he was banned for. If he had never contacted us, we wouldn’t have known about the ban, and they would have still thought we banned them.
There were a few similar events in a short time frame, leading to a few posts/comments in the community about the heavier modding policies. It’s possible some posts/comments were misunderstood by Ada, or she interpreted things differently than we would have, but it led to some bans that we felt were indeed heavy-handed, and would not violate our rules in even the most uncharitable of interpretations. We have found that this is an ongoing trend when it comes to moderation of our community from the Admins. We oppose this because it leads to many users who otherwise mean well ending up alienated and removed for reasons that are frankly completely unfair. This is, in our opinion, counter to what we set out to build in our community.
It was made clear to us that it was their instance, and that we didn’t have a say in who would be banned and what would be removed. This is, of course, perfectly valid. It’s their instance, therefore it’s up to them to decide what goes, but we no longer wanted to be the ones seen as accountable for moderation actions we have no control over. For this reason, we wanted to transfer out of lemmy.blahaj.zone. As much as we wanted to stay in the LGBTQ instance, we couldn’t come to an agreement with Ada, so we talked to her about transferring out and got her blessing.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand. Besides that, we also didn’t explain why we made the choices we made and only gave very vague answers. We avoided sharing the justification for our actions because we didn’t want to cause drama and/or exacerbate the situation, but this lack of substantiating our actions only caused the situation to worsen.
Going forward (if we may), we won’t make the same mistakes again. From now on, we will attempt to be as transparent as possible.
FAQ
Why we chose lemmy.world
Many people have been asking about why we moved to lemmy.world. It already hosts the majority of large communities and besides this uncomfortable level of centralization, it has also been somewhat controversial as of late. Despite that, we still chose lemmy.world due to the following reasons:
- Moss’s communication with the admins, and their agreement to let us moderate the community as we see fit. Ruud, after looking over our rules, agreed to abstain from taking admin action to curate or otherwise moderate our community, unless absolutely necessary.
- The instance is large enough to support traffic without performance issues (other instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.dbzer0.com would have been fine too), and the instance has a certain degree of guaranteed longevity.
- I was given a list that was kindly made by the lemmy.world people as a part of our transfer detailing those who are banned on Blahaj.zone, but not on Lemmy.world, making moderation discrepancies much easier to clean up post-transfer.
- Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
- It was, to the best of our knowledge, the most federated-with instance. We have come to understand that this is not necessarily the case.
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
This is a similar situation with what happened over on Reddit. 196 mods didn’t agree with admins and were eventually replaced (difference here is that we were not forced out, but chose to leave). As Lemmy was a large gathering spot for people fleeing Reddit, we felt it was better to try to keep the community together and move together. Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
What about the possibility of more trolls, neoliberals, bad actors, sealions, and transphobes on Lemmy.world?
Another huge issue was that the mods and the community were not on the same page regarding lemmy.world, their admins, and their policies. We understand the concern about trolls/bad-actors/transphobes, but we feel well-equipped to handle these issues. In addition, we’ve been in contact with the lemmy.world admins for a while now, and they’ve assured us that they’d allow us to moderate our community however we saw fit. All this being said, we still failed to communicate that to the community before taking action, which has undermined any assurances that we have given after the fact. We cannot apologize enough for that.
What about the people who are using instances that are defederated from lemmy.world (e.g. Beehaw)
This is an unfortunate issue that we were not aware of at the time of transfer. We’re not sure what the solution is, but want to make our community as accessible as possible. Community solutions are welcome.
Did you migrate because of X? (addressing speculation)
- We didn’t migrate due to anything related to neopronouns
- We didn’t migrate due to us supposedly not wanting to use blahaj.zone lemmy accounts
- We didn’t migrate due to us having friends who were banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone
- We didn’t migrate due to us wanting to make the space less queer/leftist/etc
- We didn’t migrate due to us getting secretly ousted by the Blahaj admin team
What now?
Well, we’re not sure. We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else. Truth be told, we don’t know what to do. For now, we will leave the comments open to civil community discourse, and choose our course of action from there.
Sincerely, Qaz, Rmbp, Greembow, A_Very_big_Fan, Peachy, and Moss.
Just wanted to chime in and say this was legitimately written by the entire mod team in a group google doc. This is not me using the royal we.
You’re modding a group of radicals. There’s a whole team. And, between you no one knows why radicals prefer distributed, duplicative grassroots structures. That’s really bad.
Okay. So.
I left Startrek.website for similar, albeit not quite the same, reasons. It boiled down to disagreements with admin too, granted the admins I had the misfortune of dealing with were horribly abusive of their position and even harassing me and admins of other sites I was on. I also chose to go to lemmy.world and also got flak, granted not nearly the amount that is being generated here.
There is something that I think a significant amount of this userbase are not remembering here. This is a federated situation. You can disagree with this all you like but it boils down to a decision was made that you do not agree with and you are not going to be able to change this. But being angry as hell, downvoting the fuck out of everything that you disagree with (which is kinda gross, shitty and remarkably reddit behavior) and just stewing in the comments isn’t going to change anything either. So, remember the fact that you’re federated.
Go make a new community.
If you don’t like the change, set up a new one. From what I can tell, there is actually one being set up. [email protected] looks like it has started and I plan on posting there. Downvote my posts if you please, if you don’t want me around I’ll get the hint and leave. But my point is that just getting angry isn’t going to help anyone. It’s just going to make you feel angry. Pour that anger into something constructive. Help build a new community being set up or even set one up yourself! The world is your oyster here and this isn’t reddit. It’s not so easy to be drowned out by major communities when the whole point of lemmy was to be able to allow these types of things to begin with.
I set up TenForward almost immediately after leaving Startrek.website and we’re doing pretty well. There are other Trek memes on other instances and we wish them nothing but the best, except for Risa which still has the aforementioned problem of extremely abusive moderators/admins. TenForward now exists as a place for people to interact in the way that myself and the other mods have envisioned and it’s thriving. You can do the same thing too!
Don’t focus on what you’ve lost and be upset about it. Use that loss to fuel the changes you want to see.
I’m not picking sides here in any way and my word wouldn’t have any weight on that scale to begin with but I do want to support everyone here. Both the mods who chose to make this decision, however you may feel about that, and trust me. While I may not have elaborated in this comment, I do feel a certain way about this decision. I agree with a lot said in these comments and disagree with a good chunk too. But what is done is done. The mods have made their decision and demonstrated they don’t plan on changing their mind. It’s just left up to you, the community, on what step you want to take next.
Make it a constructive one.
I’m inclined to agree with most of this, and while I feel like parts of this have been poorly communicated and executed, I do feel like most folks care and want the community to flourish. We’re all just people, and sometimes we communicate ineffectively, but like you, I hope all this energy goes toward creating and growing, and making a positive change.
[email protected] is already more active daily than [email protected] , so this could potentially mean that members found a new community for the future.
It would still be nice for the community to get back the old one as the name was easier to type.
Also, your situation seems different as the admin having issue with community members. Here, the members don’t have issues with the admin, it’s between the mods and the admin.
Reminds more of the [email protected] where the mods of [email protected] wanting to channel all users to their new community.
After a while, they had to reopen [email protected] , and now the two communities coexist.
[email protected] is already more active daily than [email protected] , so this is kind of done.
Active daily is not a reliable or accurate metric of community usage over a long time frame. So no, this is not “kind of done”. It’s also remarkably dismissive. Not super appreciative of that.
Also, your situation seems different as the admin having issue with community members. Here, the members don’t have issues with the admin, it’s between the mods and the admin.
Yes. I said a number of times that my situation was not the same. However, that does nothing to detract from my main point.
It’s also remarkably dismissive.
Sorry about that, I wasn’t sure you were aware of the information, I had to check myself today to know about it. It wasn’t the intention, I’ll rephrase.
Edit: done, hope it’s better.
However, that does nothing to detract from my main point.
The potential issue with saying “people can just move to another community” just gives the impression that communities are a power trip away from being taken from users. I had a power tripping example as well with [email protected] , and while similar to you [email protected] is now much more active, it still took me a while and a lot of energy to rebuild an equivalent community.
I would definitely have appreciated if the admin at the time had stepped in, but I also get why some admins don’t want to deal with communities. Tough topic.
Sorry about that, I wasn’t sure you were aware of the information, I had to check myself today to know about it. It wasn’t the intention, I’ll rephrase.
Edit: done, hope it’s better.
Understood and thank you <3
The potential issue with saying “people can just move to another community” just gives the impression that communities are a power trip away from being taken from users.
I think you misunderstood my point but that was probably on me. When i’m talking about communities, I don’t mean like /c/196 or /c/TenForward. I keep forgetting that’s the idiotic name that Lemmy decided to ascribe to them. I meant the people. Setting up /c/TenForward required honestly next to no effort because the community drive was already there to move to another location that was more in line with their views. I mean this genuinely when I say most of my effort in setting it up was creating the banner, sidebar and logo. I can’t even say it’s because of users like myself or Picard who post an inordinate amount of content joining onto TenForward. Even before we were posting a lot to the community it had a fuckload of subscribers. All we had to do was make an announcement. It’s also why [email protected] (At least the creator openly said they regret not calling it oneninesix lol, why I’ll forgive having to type that out. I wish my computer didn’t hate the dropdown autocomplete so much…) has shot up in usage so dramatically quickly.
Understood and thank you <3
You’re welcome, sorry again 🙏
because the community drive was already there to move to another location that was more in line with their views.
Indeed, very good point. Indeed, if the whole community is actively looking for a new home, it will be easy to move.
We’re in a different situation with [email protected]. It was created due to power tripping by the admin on [email protected] , but never on the community directly itself (except instance bans), so most of the people don’t really see the need to change. Hopefully PicardManeuver and PugJesus definitely help to get people to the new one, but it’s not a clear cut like the others
I didn’t even realize that was going on. Then again, I’ve never been a LotR fan. I’m hella picky about my flavors of nerd. They usually end up in space to be fair. Star Trek, The Expanse, Star Wars, etc. Although never Firefly. I couldn’t stand the opening intro.
I need to take ADHD meds
I watched all of Firefly, and it’s possible that I just need to rewatch it to see the appeal, but I just didn’t connect with it. I’m not saying it’s bad, but there are too many unexplored territories out there to force myself to try to like something I’ve experienced before.
The leadership team didn’t understand why we left Reddit or the distributed and duplicative grassroots solution of lemmy. It’s demonstrated in their authoritative attempt to move the community and choice of .world.
They still don’t understand as demonstrated in the shallow excuses above. They’ve learned nothing. They’re not fit to lead.
People seriously need to relax. Both the mods and the users. Just forget about it and continue shitposting in whatever community, it’s not even worth being upset about. Shit happens, nobody is perfect, and it’s fucking c/196, everyone should just calm the FUCK down!
Obligatory
I’m perfectly calm, dude.
People love their memes. Don’t take them away from them.
Removed by mod
Nice personal attack. Curious statement as you also had to create your own apology post recently about a drama you yourself created.
Edit: thank you mods for prompt action!
That wasn’t a personal attack, it was a simple observation and turn of phrase. Would it be a personal attack if I were to call you a fish out of water?
That wasn’t an apology post lol? I wasn’t apologizing whatsoever in that entire thread, I was asking for the opinions of people who aren’t obsessed with creating drama on Lemmy.
BUT I AM CALM
I don’t know where the other users are coming from with the lack of communication about the move; I’ve been banned from the blahaj instance and even I knew the mods were planning on moving to lemmy.world. And even though I’m happy I can interact with the community again (or at least a splinter cell of it) and that it is no longer restrained by a select few blahaj rules/admin actions, I still don’t think lemmy.world is a perfect home for the community. Albeit, I don’t know what instance would be best for either the community or myself, but it seems like within the past few years I’ve been having to jump ship from imperfect social media or forum sites too often and that overly-pickiness is isolating.
and even I knew the mods were planning on moving to lemmy.world
You’re an exception, because numerous 196 users and visitors clearly had no idea about the move. In fact, even the mods say they failed to announce the move, right in this thread where we’re commenting:
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand.
other instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.dbzer0.com would have been fine too
Ok. Why not lemm.ee or db0 then, given both of those are much less likely to affect users who do not have access to LW?
This is an unfortunate issue that we were not aware of at the time of transfer
That…shows that you are clearly not equipped to be running a large community in the fediverse. This is basic knowledge that you would have become aware of had you done even the most cursory amount of research or consultation with the community. It comes back to the problem of you springing this on the community without warning. It shows a complete lack of respect or regard for the community. If you didn’t know, ok, maybe that can be excused as just being happy in your own little bubble and not of consequence. But the fact that you never even cared enough to consider how it might affect your users is a major indictment upon you all.
We’re not sure what the solution is, but want to make our community as accessible as possible. Community solutions are welcome.
If you’re absolutely not willing to move back to blahaj, at least consider giving up on LW and moving to .ee. There is no solution to this problem while you remain on LW.
Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
In the last thread you were saying that it was very much a last-minute thing, and that’s why Ada was not given more of a heads up. What’s the truth here? The full timeline?
Before you write me off as a hater, I’d like you to know that my initial reaction to the news was pretty neutral. I enjoy posts in the 196 community and have posted a few times myself, but have never been super dedicated to it. I saw the move was happening and thought “a bit weird, but ok”. Then I followed the updates and your response to feedback. It was you throwing Ada under the bus in the comments, and demonstrating that you had failed to even consider how the community would feel about things, that turned me against this.
That…shows that you are clearly not equipped to be running a large community in the fediverse.
Zagorath woke up today and chose violence
You’re quite literally correct. I’m pretty sure that was one of, if not the, first thing I wrote this morning.
And yeah, I do think it was perhaps a little too strong. That specific quoted sentence, anyway. I still stand by most of the comment.
yeah the way this was handled was shitty and amateurish. they say that they planned this for months, that they spent a whole bunch of time making sure that it would work smoothly, but ignored the fact that many of the 196 users would be defederated and effectively banned from their community. what did they consider? if they could moderate how they want on the new home instance and keeping the post count and subscriber count. it is pretty clear that they dont have the community in mind when they made these decisions, it seems mostly motivated by their own desires based around how they want to run their community, and not what the community wants, further demonstrated by their complete lack of communication about what was happening, and handwaving of issues being raised. gosh that was a run on sentence.
Horribly handled and communicated, maybe dot world is a perfect fit for you guys after all 🤷♂️
Let’s hope that the vote doesn’t take as long as the Respectful Dissent policy review
if you cant mod a meme community perhaps you shouldnt?
As a supporter of the move to Lemmy.world, I do also believe you should unlock original 196 and hand it over to whoever wants to mod it. Multiple communities on the Fediverse is not a bad thing, and while locking it was a sensible strategic decision to get the community to move, the level of backlash has made it untenable as a solution, and even a temporary lock is possibly more harm than good at this point.
Thank you!
Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
Ah yes, because [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] are really inactive communities who are struggling to survive /s
Why don’t you just want to unlock [email protected] , let Ada organize the follow up, and then move to Lemmy.world if that’s what you prefer?
That way people who want to stay with you just follow you, and the Blahaj people can have their community back.
Why don’t you just want to unlock [email protected]
Perhaps that’s the best option for now. I’ve started an internal vote.
EDIT: It stalled at 2-2, and the other mods are offline, but I’m just going to count the community as the tiebreaker and open it anyway
also dont forget the
let Ada organize the follow up, and then move to Lemmy.world if that’s what you prefer?
part, not just the unlocking
internal vote
“internal votes” is what caused all this in the first place
for now
what does that even mean? unlock it and then maybe lock it again some other time?
That would be great, and allow everyone to calm down.
Holy shit my fucking sides at you specifically talking about others calming down
?
It’s unlocked
Most mod members aren’t online right now, so it might take a little bit more time
Ironic to wait for other mods to be online to have a vote when not consulting your community at all before the move.
??? I don’t think those two things are equivalent man
[email protected] got started a few hours ago as an alternative community to the one you locked and reached 1180 active users and 124 posts in less than 6 hours.
Are you really going to try to use the “more communities divide the community” when you divided the community yourself, and the members showed you that they were going to post elsewhere than the LW community anyway?
this is just straight up not the case
Thanks for continuing to prove that this is most definitely the case.
