Aw, I wanted to be bottom-panel guy until these edits…

Hey, much respect to that.

If I may, this is fucking adorable. Great idea that I’m glad to see is getting some traction!

I just want to take a moment to say your username is amazing.

Damn right!

I’ve

🤔

See, everyone is coming in and talking about different means of measuring instances, the implications for the fediverse and the position of federated services against corporate monoliths like reddit.

But you, verity - you get it.

So!? We’re #5! Or 4! Or something!

(Not everything needs a point - I just felt like posting this. Though it does look like it’s started a discussion about the relative size of lemmy and different instances, which is neat to think about once in a while - or disheartening depending on your perspective)

I haven’t read the response to you quite yet (though skimmed, and saw some cool words I like), but IME, not really/not as well as you might like.

I know some instances (well, only one I know of - the instance I’m at) have a voting system that hinges around instance membership and declaration by post. It’s not perfect, but it gets around the more obvious stuff (bot instances - if you’re not a sh.it.head, it doesn’t count; admins can refer to unusual patterns in registration around vote time if something seems amiss, etc.)

But in that case, it’s about decisions at an instance level. In this case, it’s a little trickier. I don’t know if people want the vote to be blahaj users only (though I support that), or if admins are interested in facilitating that/watching for signs of obvious screwiness.

It’s a tricky proposal to ensure it’s 100% fair and resistant to manipulation, though I’m sure there’s a way to do it. Still think it’s important to attempt, though.

Understood, but these were selected based on what seems to work for your average customer service person/office worker. The amount of times I’ve said ‘Sierra’ and got back C is too many.

Might re-think Frank over Foxtrot, though. That’s more habit than anything else.

Agreed in other contexts these are not the best choices, and there’s a reason they are not that in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Agreed. IMO it’s a coked-out SMB fanfic that became a movie, and I love it.

I’m all about that NATO phonetic alphabet - which for some reason rubs certain people answering phones the wrong way.

Can’t say I don’t have a couple substitutions, though (Zebra instead of Zulu, Sam instead of Sierra, Frank instead of Foxtrot), but it’s not like I’m working the radio of an aircraft or something.

Man, I just wanted to chant “We’re #5”, now I have people coming at me with facts. :p

(Jokes aside, I appreciate it. There’s nuance to these metrics and what best accounts for ‘size’, particularly for those cases/services where the metrics reflect a little bugginess anyway)

100% - trust me, I also jumped to the same conclusion based on initial reactions until I was like “Wait, did a mod or admin say something more specific somewhere else?”. Not everyone has interest or bandwidth to do so [helped that I was hungover yesterday, so I rotted on Lemmy all day].

…come to think of it, there’s lessons that are applicable to the IRL news cycle too, lol.

100% agree with you there. Helpful’s underselling it, I’d say non-negotiable given Ada’s comments.

My only thought about locking it down if there’s overwhelming support for migrating to .world (which I think is very unlikely) is to give time for people who still wouldn’t want to follow the mods to sort out what they want to do, while stemming the flow of stuff while BLZ 196 is unmoderated to reduce load on the admins (which seems to have been one key part of the problems).

It’s a big community, and I could see a jump in malicious activity while a) a new mod team is being sorted out, and b) importantly, people work with the admins to say “K, the old mod team’s approach caused some problems for you. As manager of the resource we want to use, how can we manage that better to reopen 196”. That and maybe at that point, people staying might prefer a clean break to onehundredninetysix.

The intent would not to keep 196 locked permanently the way I’m thinking about it unless folks want to change to onehundredninetysix - probably would be like a day or less. I could 100% be making much out of nothing re: transfer to a new mod team, though, particularly given how this went down and the pool of potential moderators that announced interest already.

First, I want to thank you for this post and taking accountability for the mistakes made with this.

I’ll also acknowledge that not being able to see who performed moderator actions can create misunderstandings like you describe.

My own suggestion would be along the following lines:

1. Reopen this instance’s community on an interim basis. I’ll acknowledge I don’t know what implications this has for the .world community, and how that would need to be managed.

2. Put a user poll up about whether users want this community to be migrated to .world. Keep it up for a reasonable amount of time (say a week).

3. Honour the results. If the vote says keep this community here, commit to moderating it here. If there are members of the team who feel they cannot do this, allow them to step down without any flack. You’re all volunteers - if it’s too much for someone, it’s too much. That’s fair and doesn’t take away from their prior efforts and support.

4. If the community votes to stay here, work with the blahaj admins again on how to balance the needs of the community v. the fact that the community wants you to use their resources. Yes, I know you have done this already. But two things jump to mind first:
   a) there seems to be a resource problem re: addressing some kinds of complaints/reports in this community in a timely manner. This might be offset by more mods to help out - I know in the wake of this, many have expressed interest in volunteering.
   b) perhaps a compromise can be met re: a very basic identification of where a moderation action came from - a simple tag [A] for admin, [CM] for Community Moderator. This would reduce any confusion as to where the ban came from, and with it the rationale. I’m not suggesting this would resolve all tensions, but may help manage their worst impacts.

This seems reasonable to me, but I will acknowledge I am not in your position when offering these.

I mean this is the ideal. Most of the time I’m right there with ya. I’m just really attached to this instance - doesn’t mean that others are bad for not being on this (upon review, actually somewhat problematic) list.

From what I’ve read so far, this move is supposedly related to a certain dragon using specific pronouns.

This is not really true, though not entirely irrelevant either. Some useful information below:
https://lemmy.world/comment/14552252

The gist of it is, the mods do not agree with how the blahaj admin moderates, and how they apply the instance rules to the community. The neopronoun stuff could be an example (see: if someone was approaching it in good faith, and got banned for it - I don’t have an example of that, but I also haven’t looked), but isn’t really the gripe here.

Again, the biggest problem here is just the community mods suddenly saying “Hi guys, we’re over at .world now and c/196 is locked. Go there now” with very little notice, no community input, and scant details up front about the actual issue they had. The fact that the actual conflicts weren’t outlined in more detail is why people are jumping to “it’s because of dragon trolls”. There is a user who uses neopronouns who often caused a stir, and there was controversy around how they/people misgendering them were dealt with, but that’s not it in itself from my perspective, looking into it further.

Heck, if they made a sticky post saying “We’re looking at moving c/196 to another instance” a few months ago when the mod team started working on it[see edit], people probably would be less upset than they are now. Let alone putting it to a poll.

I don’t want to make it sound like the c/196 team is nefarious or something, because IMO they are not. I just think they had a big lapse in judgement here around transparency, as well as a definition around community ownership that doesn’t jive all that well with a lot of folks on federated services.

Edit: By the way, friends, if it turns out there was some form of notice in advance other than the current sticky and its duplicate (I know there wasn’t consultation), please tell me. It’s important to be clear on the facts - if we’re not, we get people saying and repeating stuff like “it’s because of the neopronoun stuff that came up”, which is not really true.