InternetTubes

Here’s my experience on the fediverse: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit

If you are trying to access it like me now, you might get an Error 50x, but no matter since I can resume it with far more reliable Internet WayBack Machine links.

With my user [email protected], I made the last comment you see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected] inside a thread that still ends with “mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.”

As a result, one of the admins purged and banned my account, removing months of comments and participation, not to mention any credibility I would have when pointing out the claims had I not been able to store them in IWB: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog

The most recent lemmy.world modlog has even been purged of all mentions of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog (Search for HEISENBERG and search back up to see the huge gap). The way they acted with my account gives me the impressions that claims from other users who say they were moderators with them are true: https://lemmy.ml/comment/5060380

I’ve submitted a ticket, whose link leads to a service hosted on mastodon.world, and have received no reply: https://imgur.com/a/aisRzL9

My suggestions:

There needs to be remediation and resilience against bad faith moderation and instances within the fediverse system, otherwise there will be people who take advantage of it. My original comment has criticisms regarding permanent bans as well.

The fediverse could benefit from having a way to migrate accounts if you run into problems with an instance that wouldn’t be considered a problem in another instance, to safeguard your submission history.

Modlogs are good but worthless when they can be manipulated, and the fediverse might do well to consider ways to implement decentralized tracking of them to monitor attempts to alter them.

Still, just because an experiment doesn’t have the ideal results doesn’t mean it doesn’t get us closer. Unfortunately, if people are going to trust the server with the best marketing instead looking into issues like this, it pretty much makes it impossible to move on because bad faith actors who are best at lying and cutthroat tactics will be the ones to prevail over people questioning what you are telling them without reading the mountains of evidence you are using to back your claims.

The rot definitely seems too close to the core with lemmy.

I’m not sure what’s up, but entries have certainly been removed. This was then: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog

This was a more recent IWM archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog

Search for “HEISENBERG” in both and then read back through to the most recent to get an idea of how different they are. Some bans are showing up, some aren’t, a lot of them aren’t even there.

I’m no expert, but modlog isn’t exactly the same across all instances. I think actions like a user getting banned in their home instance do get propagated to the other modlogs, since my ban got propagated to lemmy.ml’s moglog, but this user’s ban in lemmy.world wasn’t.

I haven’t touched the lemmy code, but seeing what’s mentioned over at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2349 , the modlog seems to be just a combination of database tables that are normally maintained server side but, just like in any other database, can be edited manually.

Only trust the modlog as much as you trust the server you are reading it on.

Yeah, I’m really getting the feeling they are just trying to bury it and ignore it. I was having trouble accessing the modlog, but when I was able to, they seemed to have gone through the effort to eliminate a lot of the entries, which included my account purge, ban, and ban reason. They still haven’t even bothered to answer the ticket I put up on tickets.mastodon.world, maybe I’ll add a screenshot to that later to show the ticket status and the time it has spent as unanswered. No admin has replied to me directly, and the closest I’ve seen any admin reply on the issue is to criticize the kbin.social instance as reliable because of the criticism they get on them.

The real problem is this is being done in bad faith, and if that’s their core drive, then the only thing they’ll do in the future is make-up better sounding excuses to cover their asses.

Seriously, this is the least of its problems, but it certainly hints at them: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit

Basically, they don’t even follow the examples they set in their Terms of Service and will not only ban but purge your entire comment account on a whim because they didn’t like the criticism they said they were open to on a post stating that “users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World.” There’s no doubt, they were pretty clear they considered the criticism “disagreeing with the terms of service”.

Create your user on another instance and save yourself the surprise of encountering admins who abuse their power on a whim. That can be your entire account history down the drain, and the number of comments or the age of the account won’t matter to them.

What happens when a unstoppable force meets an immovable object.