This is inspired by this advice from a few months ago:

Stop giving shitty mods a free pass. Honest mistakes happen; but if the mod in question is assumptive, disingenuous, trigger-happy, or eager to enable certain shitty types of user, spread the word about their comm being poorly moderated. And don’t interact directly with the comm. I think that at least here in the Fediverse we should demand higher standards from our mods.

(Emphasis mine.)

In the past I have used places like [email protected] or [email protected] to call out mods on other subs, with mid-to-almost-high degrees of success, but I wonder if it would be better to have a dedicated sublemmy?

Here are my thoughts on what would make this effective:

  • probably shouldn’t be hosted on .world due to the breadth of possible conflicts of interest with admins
  • probably shouldn’t be hosted on .ml due to federation hurdles
  • mods of the community shouldn’t moderate any other communities of any significant size, in order to make the whole “accountability” thing work
  • mods should be willing and able to deal with substantial quantities of garbage posts because there would be a lot of “why won’t c/xyz let me be transphobic/say slurs 😡😡” type submissions which, left unaddressed, would outflood genuine criticism

This is still in conceptual form so I am interested what others think :)

  • @Anon518English
    7•3 days ago

    I think it’s essential to have one or more communities like this. There were a few on reddit – watchredditdie, declineintocensorship, and more. The admins shut them down. I was unsuccessful in getting them to move over to Lemmy.

    Absolutely the same things happen on lemmy. It’s to be expected from both mods and admins. We need to have a place we can go to find out “which are the bad communities & instances”.

    The main problem I foresee is that those “watchredditdie and declineintocensorship” subs seemed to be well modded and mostly populated with intelligent people. In contrast, lemmy seems to have quite a lot of trolls, unintelligent people, and likely astroturfing. That will make things more difficult.