InternetTubes
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
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 InternetTubes@lemmy.world, I made the last comment you see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@InternetTubes@lemmy.world 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.
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.
Their team is more than one person, so I’m trying to see if I can get a reply from their email in case I can get a more reasonable answer. I have little hope of it, they seem to be a pretty small team (relatively speaking) and I get the impression it was the same person who wrote the Terms of Service.
Funnily enough, another user who was actually being rude in the same thread got banned a few hours earlier but had his comment history as well as the taunts he made in the thread left untouched, showing much more willingness on their part to maintain and even drop down to that level of discourse. I’m not even sure why they are bothering with a Terms of Service if they are just winging it and don’t even care about maintaining appearance.
Lemmy’s developers run lemmy.ml, and incidentally, I just looked at their modlog and found this:
Banned @InternetTubes
reason: disagreeing with the Terms of Service - don’t worry your content is gone
at the same time it appeared on lemmy.world’s modlog. At the very least, it seems to hint its the same admin and that they went through the effort to attempt to ban it on both instances.
Yeah, this pretty much wasn’t an accident, they just also banned this user, one I had created long before the ban, because of:
reason: Ban evasion
While having no problem doing that, what they haven’t done is replied directly or addressed the ticket I sent them, so any benefit of the doubt is pretty much extinguished on my side.
It’s clear to me they want to sweep it under the rugs on the hope that controlling the narratives on the most popular lemmy instance works out for them. This was probably what they intended by purging my account all along, thankfully they didn’t seem to keep in mind the nuances of the fediverse which has still allowed me to keep evidence and my user account history despite their worst instincts.
What happens when a unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
I had uBlock Origin and I didn’t mind paying for YouTube Premium. When I will mind paying for YouTube Premium will be when all of my feed is full of reactionary populist channels, not to avoid paying part of the income that pays some of the people making a career out of streaming on the platform I’ve been avoiding even watching ads on.
It will be a losing battle for the people not trying to look for alternatives - in the end, Google has control of the backend, they can eventually decide to incorporate ads directly into the streams that are served to people protocol wise and they can decide to forego giving users any warning of when an ad will play and when they will try to force the video into forced reproduction.
That the streams are served in a way where the browser can discern when it should play the ads is more of a courtesy from a legacy architecture that came from a Google that wasn’t intent on cracking down on people adblocking, and people may have to revert back to using more specific and resource intensive YouTube adblockers that try to guess when a commercial break is starting and ending directly from the video stream like old school VCRs did: https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,-2869,00.html
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.