I’ve been on lemmy for over a year now, and I just realized I used to read all those HackerNews articles + their comments, I haven’t done that in probably 6 months because the discussion here has gotten much better. What’s changed for you with Lemmy over the last year?
I got banned from the Canada community and according to the mod log, it was for homophobia and bigotry.
That really rubs me the wrong way because I’ve never ever posted anything like that. I’ve been the subject of homophobic and bigotry based bullying my whole life and the only comment I posted on that topic there was an account of my first hand experience of being catfished on Grindr and then outed as bi on the towns facebook page and subjected to ridicule and harassment.
I mean the nice thing about Lemmy is you can always create your own community, and if that’s not enough, your own instance.
It removes a bad mods ability to completely dominate, because there’s always an escape hatch for folks who are just done with their shit.
You can do that on most platforms. It isn’t worth the effort unless you can pull users into your new community. That’s hard.
You don’t need any users to interact with other instances. A lot of people are in a instance of one person, themselves.
Are you still bound by the rules of individual instances, no matter if you agree with them or not? Yes.
If their rules upset you, consider blocking the entire instance/community.
True, but when it’s a main community that pertains to your interests, it’s crappy to be banned from it for fictional reasons. Would be the same on any other social media site I guess. I find people here are more militant in their beliefs.
I believe you misunderstood why you were banned.
You were banned because of incivility and ableism. You were making derogatory comments about the mentally ill as though having a illness was a bad thing.
I can see why you were confused, as homophobia is also listed under rule 1.
Yeah. Lemmy’s biggest strength (decentralization) has also shown to be one of it’s biggest flaws when micro-managing admins/mods turn their instance into their own personal fiefdom, inflicting their “justice” broadly and without discernment. I’ve been banned more here in under 2 years than on reddit for over 13, almost exclusively for voting “wrong” according to what feedback I can find, which is a a seriously treacherous practice in communities like these. I have no real sense of loss over it, but I do worry the Lemmy-verse will end up with tons of siloed off instances instead of an interconnected community if it goes on unadressed.
Things I have been permanently banned for:
Admins and moderators of all stripes: you should be handing out three-day bans like candy. You can give people a month-long fuck-off time-out, and in the future, they will think twice. Even if it takes a few whacks. But all a one-step permanent ban does is chase people to new accounts. That’s why outright trolls do it - it’s not hard, and you don’t seem great at catching them. The experience for people who are merely wrong has to be better than for people who are actively malicious, or you will cease to see any difference between their behavior.