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” (paraphrased, but close to their actual response).
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.
Thanks
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.
Thank you for your service o7
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.
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.
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.
Yes, which is exactly why it’s particularly devastating when they receive animosity and hate in exchange.
it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.
What about the cases where “what is meaningful to them” conflicts with “what is meaningful to the others”?
I said on a sibling comment but it bears repeating: I am not talking about someone who enjoys a hobby and goes on to create/mod a community about it. I am thinking about the cases where someone finds themselves as part of a large community and realizes that the majority of the members keep pushing you to things you either don’t want to or disagree with.
Some people are willing to go against their own personal wants and desires if the majority of the community agrees. They may do it because they believe in democratic principles and whatever it is may be not what they want but doesn’t cross the their “line-in-the-sand” of what they are willing to do in service of their community.
And when it does finally cross that line, people will step down like Kevin has done. I may not agree with the democratically elected government of America right now but I am still an American. You don’t have to agree 100% with the community to still be a member
Then we are talking about two different things. The post that I responded to did not make that clear. You should be more careful about using generalizations.
I’d say that they are the same thing, just in different contexts. But okay, if I wasn’t clear it’s on me to fix it.
You sound like you’re referencing something specific but you’re speaking as if this is some broader issue
It is a broader issue, namely: there is no such thing as doing a “thankless” job for purely altrustic reasons. This is not an issue on a small scale, but once it reaches it some critical mass we should wonder what motivates those who keep a position of authority.
(And before I get another barrage of people saying “I do it because I care about it/ I want to help / someone needs to do it”… yeah, sure, but if you are cultivating something because you happen to like the thing at hand , then you are doing for your own personal interest and it is not entirely altruistic. And that is totally fine.)
I moderated a 2mill person sub on the shithole site until I left over the API fiasco. I was never paid, I was never interviewed, I received nothing. I banned maybe 10 people over 3 years. Only a few friends know I even did it and it’s because it organically came up during the api shit.
I legitimately did it because I had been a member of the community for years and really felt passionate about keeping its standards and making sure it remained safe for the community. I am not amazing, I am not unusual. Most mods on some level do it because they want to see a community thrive. The terrible ones exist, there are even a lot of them. But as you can imagine, people don’t notice the quiet ones who just do their thing and tend to it the same way they tend to a garden.
Your idea of “thankless” is part of the issue as well as your parenthetical which arbitrarily decides “you can answer it but I don’t accept your answer.” The satisfying part was watching it grow and people just have a good time. Again, like seeing a nice garden. If you boil anything down enough nothing is ever truly altruistic, not even donating to your favorite charity, because you can say “well you did it so you would feel good.” It sounds to me that you just have an axe to grind with the concept of mods in general
I legitimately did it because I had been a member of the community for years and really felt passionate about keeping its standards and making sure it remained safe for the community.
Would you do it for a community you didn’t care about?
Do you think that doing something because you “really felt passionate about it” is “selfless”?
Some people volunteer and contribute out of their own good will for the betterment of society. Especially people who believe in FOSS which is a reasonable expectation out of someone who admins FOSStodon
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.
Some people chose to do the right things because they are right
This is just another way of saying that people do things for moral validation - a.k.a, self-righteouness - and is no at all different from “power tripping”.
That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.
Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I’ve had my nihilistic phase in my 20’s. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the “arbitrariness” of ethics.
Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.
I’m thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.
I am not at all talking about the cases of someone who is passionate about some topic and then goes on to cultivate a community around it, and I am not saying “every moderator is doing it for some ulterior motive”.
I am talking specifically about the types that put on themselves to become mods of dozens of subreddits. Or instance admins that go months in a row begging for money to be able to pay their own bills, instead of shutting down the instance or make it only for those that contribute back.
IOW, I am talking about the cases where people act beyond what anyone would consider “healthy”.
Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it’s really … Just not very healthy behavior.
Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much an end in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.
If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?
So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.
Nah I get no dopamine from doing the right thing its neutral, some ppl just help build the place they want to see, obviously no one does anything for no reason at all?
Yeah, right 🤦 Sorry but I must conclude you have some serious intellectual stunting if you truly believe that.
Ayn Rand level of delusion.Hey, any comparison to Ayn Rand or their fans should be an immediate ban. No need to go that low.
All I’ve been arguing with you could be summed up as “if we want the Fediverse to be universal, we will need to grow a lot faster and we need to accept the reality that not everyone values the same things as you do” and you responding “No, I don’t to make the Fediverse universal because most people are too morally weak to stand for the things I care about”.
(And if you think I am exagerating: don’t make me look for the conversation where you said that people should be okay using this crap because the other open source alternatives committed the grave sin of “raising money from investors”.)
Fine I didn’t need to go as low as Ayn Rand.
But I think you still didn’t get my argument last time. Tl;dr: there is no point in doing what you propose as it just results in recreating the same shit we already have. This has nothing to do with moral failings and everything with strategy and not repeating the same mistakes all over again.
And besides that I agree that Siskin isn’t great, and most likely suggested this instead. And that “open-source alternative” is now open-core and can’t pay their bloated expenses now that VC funding has run dry. I hope you see the irony in what you just wrote, because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.
it just results in recreating the same shit we already have
This is you passing opinion as undisputed truth. I am not proposing “Let’s take on the big corporations by building another big corporation”, I am saying “we can get rid of the dominance from big corporations if we help foment an economy of small, independent businesses.” and I am saying “if we keep this anti-business culture where we are hostile to even some food truck owner trying to connect to their customers, then don’t complain when the food truck owner continues using Facebook/Instagram/Twitter”.
And that “open-source alternative” is now open-core
Synapse is still AGPLv3. Their closed parts are for Enterprise. No one is being locked out of crucial features. No one is being locked out of reaching out other users of the network. No one is being forced to “upgrade” after reaching a certain size. To call it open-core is just yet-another display of bias.
and most likely suggested this (Monal) instead.
Monal does not make video calls! Not having video calls was a non-starter in 2015, let alone today.
because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.
Is it? Because so far I managed to talk with a lot more people on Matrix than I ever did on XMPP, and that wouldn’t change even if Element closed shop tomorrow. And even if it did, the odds would be highly in favor of some other company like Beeper picking up the pieces to serve its customers and it would still be in their interest to keep things open to have the ecosystem around.
So, at the end of the day, yes, I’d rather have this “unsustainable” growth than claiming any moral victory for sticking to the Betamax of chat protocols. This “unsustainable” system gave me and few hundred million people something that is far from perfect, but at least it can make video calls on iOS.
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 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 by existing staff.
So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.
Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.
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.
You can do things because you want to make a difference. A good difference. Not everything has to have an ulterior motive.
What “difference” is someone doing by being a mod of 50-odd subreddits, like the case of the mod in question?
I moderate a privacy community because they were looking for mods. I just delete spam from time to time
When the stakes are small, sure.
But if you were to find yourself with a community with hundreds of thousands of people, and let’s say that 0.01% percent of any group is made of people who seem like they are out to just make everyone’s life miserable, so every week we will have to deal with a couple of dozen cases of obnoxnious behavior, petty disputes, etc… how long do you think you’d be able to endure it?
Speaking for myself: I was remembering the time when I found myself as the owner and main mod of the University’s group on Orkut. When it was mostly discussions among actual students and faculty, it was all nice. Even when discussions were heated, they were not out of control. But when Orkut exploded in Brazil and it became a place for soapbox politics, spam, shouting matches between the student factions, people wanting to share articles about city events, etc, etc… it became too much for me and the handful of co-owners that joined me in the period.
I’m just not invested enough to care. At the end of the day nobody forces me to check the reports
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.
Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.
So many questions… :)
- What community?
- From this account, or some other? You profile page doesn’t show you as moderator for anything.
- What form of compensation are you talking about?
Don’t really want to get too deep into it but its a Facebook community and its relevant to my business and I use the community to promote my business. It’s become a large source of my business. It’s the only reason I can’t delete my Facebook profile.
Ah, I thought you were talking about something here on the Fediverse.
In any case, I wish people didn’t feel afraid to talk about business here. Maybe more people would realize that behind the majority of “business” there are genuine people and not just the cartoon capitalist pigs.
I have a Ghost blog for my business. It’ll be in the fedi as soon as they make that available for self-hosters. For now, it’s just crossposting via MastoFeed. I’ve also contacted them about posting them to Lemmy, as it seems like a much more fitting platform.
Interesting! I hope to see posts from your business soon, and it would be great to have more people like you contributing to the communities on https://indiehackers.space/
Feel like Im missing a lot of context.
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
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”
EDIT: There’s more to it. Seems like said mod is also active on Reddit (https://lemm.ee/post/60365167)
I don’t know if your changed your view on the issue after getting more context on carrotcypher’s histoy on Reddit but I’d like to share some of my quick thoughts
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I don’t think it’s probably fair to characterize him as a nazi but I do think it’s fair to find some of his views objectionable
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He let his personal politics influence his moderation decisions outside of posted community rules. It’s bad moderation when Lemmy.ml doesn’t it and it’s bad when he does it,
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Removing him as moderator is appropriate based on number 2 moreso than number 1
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Defederation from FOSStodon is a nuclear reaction that I don’t personally agree with but it’s a freedom that the fediverse is built on. Zealously demanding all (non-malicious) instances remain federated is a bad thing as much as zealously defederating from instances that don’t have the right politics.
I often find myself outside the “acceptable viewpoints” on the fediverse and it hasn’t really affected me other than getting a few downvotes once in a while. The fediverse isn’t actually as ideologically pure as we think it is, I think the constant tankie/liberal drama is proof of that.
I agree with almost all of your points, but I don’t think that it’s okay to normalize guilt by association, and I call them “the mob” because I see these calls for defederation less as a real concern for their safety and more of instrument to enforce compliance.
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- 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?
Just to respond to point (6): From the blog post, there is a link to a post from someone moving from fosstodon to hachyderm that says:
Overall I’m satisfied with the moderation process and neutrality on Fosstodon. What to do? As a Fosstodon user, it’s hard to see any future path with the instance that works in my favor. (…) Most will never know anything about the name other than “the instance which allowed a nazi mod”. While I believe the characterization is 100% untrue and unfair, the die is cast for lots of people.
If I stay, the likely outcomes are:- Limited communication with some other people, because some other instance mods will choose to block Fosstodon
- Will have to explain my choices and the highlights of this post any time someone says “eeeww, Fosstodon”, occasionally and probably forever
- Some people will incorrectly assume I hold certain views based on my association with fosstodon
So, yes, at least one person is moving to another instance not because they are particularly against the admins, but for fear of being judged by association.
- 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.
So, the usual “on the Fediverse you shalln’t be anything less than immaculately perfect” crap?
don’t openly be a biggot doesn’t seem that hard
I understand the concern to be honest. The problem here is that when someone is a bigot and they are at least reasonable enough to walk themselves out, the response of the community is to stain everyone else by association.
Trust is not associative, and tbh distrust probably should also not be.
there’s a difference between not being perfect and supporting outing trans children.
Yet the mob not only punishes for the former, but does it so instance-wide, needlessly tarnishing the reputation of normal users of the instance while the admins moderated that problem on their own.
Punishing people by transitivity only gets communities so far.
The 11th commandment.
Alas, not everyone on the fediverse is so friendly and welcoming towards people who “express certain political views” by using a position of power to suppress those they disagree with.
I’m having trouble parsing your sentence. Do you mean that the mods/admins of fosstodon were using their position of power to suppress anyone?
That is what their mod was accused of having done, albeit on reddit. If Kev believes those allegations to be unfounded, he’s done a poor job of expressing that.
That is what their mod was accused of having done
He was accused of lots of things. But was there any concrete evidence of that? All I saw was a comment from reddit where he said something stupid.
It’s not as if I did an exhaustive search to sift through all the evidence, but what I found was this: https://lemm.ee/post/60365167
Thank you. I wouldn’t take it hard evidence of anything, but I did miss the part where he was actually a mod on Reddit as well.
We just can’t have nice things…
In this economy???
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