TL;DR: We tried to move the community because of moderatorial concerns, but fumbled how we went about doing so.
First and Foremost:
We'd like to formally apologize for springing this on you all out of nowhere, and for taking so long to respond to the backlash. With retrospect, we understand that we should have notified you all beforehand to create an opportunity to give us feedback. We understand that a lot of respect and trust was lost, and we expect it'll take a lot of work and a lot of time before we can earn it back, but we would be grateful if y’all gave us that chance.
What happened, and why?
The primary issue that incited this was because we don't fully agree with the admin's moderation policies. By and large they do a great job and align with us on mod actions, but there have been several cases where we strongly disagreed, and our choices were overruled.
For example, 2 months ago, Kolanaki reached out to us via email and said they were banned from 196 for “playing the victim” and asked us why we banned him, but we didn’t. Moss talked to them and realized that the ban was unjust after reviewing the comment he was banned for. If he had never contacted us, we wouldn't have known about the ban, and they would have still thought we banned them.
There were a few similar events in a short time frame, leading to a few posts/comments in the community about the heavier modding policies. It's possible some posts/comments were misunderstood by Ada, or she interpreted things differently than we would have, but it led to some bans that we felt were indeed heavy-handed, and would not violate our rules in even the most uncharitable of interpretations. We have found that this is an ongoing trend when it comes to moderation of our community from the Admins. We oppose this because it leads to many users who otherwise mean well ending up alienated and removed for reasons that are frankly completely unfair. This is, in our opinion, counter to what we set out to build in our community.
It was made clear to us that it was their instance, and that we didn’t have a say in who would be banned and what would be removed. This is, of course, perfectly valid. It’s their instance, therefore it's up to them to decide what goes, but we no longer wanted to be the ones seen as accountable for moderation actions we have no control over. For this reason, we wanted to transfer out of lemmy.blahaj.zone. As much as we wanted to stay in the LGBTQ instance, we couldn't come to an agreement with Ada, so we talked to her about transferring out and got her blessing.
How we messed up
The most major failing on our part is, of course, that we didn’t announce the migration beforehand. Besides that, we also didn’t explain why we made the choices we made and only gave very vague answers. We avoided sharing the justification for our actions because we didn’t want to cause drama and/or exacerbate the situation, but this lack of substantiating our actions only caused the situation to worsen.
Going forward (if we may), we won't make the same mistakes again. From now on, we will attempt to be as transparent as possible.
FAQ
Why we chose lemmy.world
Many people have been asking about why we moved to lemmy.world. It already hosts the majority of large communities and besides this uncomfortable level of centralization, it has also been somewhat controversial as of late. Despite that, we still chose lemmy.world due to the following reasons:
- Moss's communication with the admins, and their agreement to let us moderate the community as we see fit. Ruud, after looking over our rules, agreed to abstain from taking admin action to curate or otherwise moderate our community, unless absolutely necessary.
- The instance is large enough to support traffic without performance issues (other instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.dbzer0.com would have been fine too), and the instance has a certain degree of guaranteed longevity.
- Moss was given a list that was kindly made by the lemmy.world people as a part of our transfer detailing those who are banned on Blahaj.zone, but not on Lemmy.world, making moderation discrepancies much easier to clean up post-transfer.
- Our agreement with Ruud predated the now-rescinded policy changes
- It was, to the best of our knowledge, the most federated-with instance. We have come to understand that this is not necessarily the case.
Why not have another team take over the original 196?
This is a similar situation with what happened over on Reddit. 196 mods didn't agree with admins and were eventually replaced (difference here is that we were not forced out, but chose to leave). As Lemmy was a large gathering spot for people fleeing Reddit, we felt it was better to try to keep the community together and move together. Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.
What about the possibility of more trolls, neoliberals, bad actors, sealions, and transphobes on Lemmy.world?
Another huge issue was that the mods and the community were not on the same page regarding lemmy.world, their admins, and their policies. We understand the concern about trolls/bad-actors/transphobes, but we feel well-equipped to handle these issues. In addition, we've been in contact with the lemmy.world admins for a while now, and they've assured us that they'd allow us to moderate our community however we saw fit. All this being said, we still failed to communicate that to the community before taking action, which has undermined any assurances that we have given after the fact. We cannot apologize enough for that.
What about the people who are using instances that are defederated from lemmy.world (e.g. Beehaw)
This is an unfortunate issue that we were not aware of at the time of transfer. We're not sure what the solution is, but want to make our community as accessible as possible. Community solutions are welcome.
Did you migrate because of X? (addressing speculation)
- We didn’t migrate due to anything related to neopronouns
- We didn’t migrate due to us supposedly not wanting to use blahaj.zone lemmy accounts
- We didn’t migrate due to us having friends who were banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone
- We didn’t migrate due to us wanting to make the space less queer/leftist/etc
- We didn’t migrate due to us getting secretly ousted by the Blahaj admin team
What now?
Well, we're not sure. We could go back on our decision and stay on blahaj.zone, continue on lemmy.world, do both, or try something else. Truth be told, we don't know what to do. For now, we will leave the comments open to civil community discourse, and choose our course of action from there.
Sincerely, Qaz, Rmbp, Greembow, A_Very_big_Fan, Peachy, and Moss.
Yes, the community and the mods are clearly still not on the same page on this matter, despite how transparent we've been in the OP and how much I've been in my replies. "Ah, but you weren't transparent until after the fact", that's addressed later in this comment.
That's also addressed later in this comment, but for now I have a question... LW is already federated with LBZ, so how does being hosted there make a difference in terms of transphobes/etc. coming in from LW? The whole point of the fediverse is that those floodgates are already open. We already get loads of LW users on all of the LBZ subs, and we've had no issues dealing with them so far on 196. There really isn't that much to do in order to deal with it, and there are eight of us, so I don't think the absence of Ada would make that an issue either. Plus, this post demonstrates how much free time I alone have and am willing to put into this community.
(And I'm not asking this question as an implicit statement. I just think that there must be some aspect of federated platforms that I don't understand considering it's relevance to this whole ordeal. (And if you're thinking "ah, but here's what Ada said about what you don't understand about federation!" I addressed it here and here.))
I feel like this question was worded weirdly but I will answer according to my best interpretation.
We felt no need to publish other people's DMs since that's generally something you shouldn't do, especially when establishing a relationship with people... So if you want to see them for yourself, you'll have to ask Moss, since they were her and Ruud's DMs. I don't feel comfortable posting them myself.
It is "our" community in the sense that we are, and always have been, responsible for it. We're not suggesting you owe us your contributions.
To speak frankly again, I don't think the community is largely aware of the moderation that was taking place. (I mean, when is the last time you looked at the instance modlog?) Kolanaki was just one example. Maybe it'll be illuminating to share my personal reason for taking issue with Ada's moderation:
I was sexually abused when I was young, so before I understood I was trans I would say things like "I wouldn't be intimate with a trans person" because I was scared that it would complicate a matter that was already sensitive for me. I've caught a lot of flak online for saying things like that in the past despite having now embraced my identity as a trans person, but I adamantly believe the feelings I expressed were valid from my perspective at the time.
For this reason, I value giving people patience and hearing them out, even if what they said has a transphobic "vibe". (At least when what they are expressing isn't blatant transphobia). When I joined the mod team, this is one of the values I intended to bring to the team.
That being said, Ada does not give that level of patience. However, I do understand the value of curating a space exclusively dedicated to queer people and their views. Cishet people have damn near the entire internet to express their views in safety, and and Ada does what she does to guarantee a safe space for us. So I don't blame Ada for how she runs her instance, I just don't think it aligns with my goals, and many of the other mods here agree.
We also have zero control over Ada's administration, but she was not willing to let us moderate 196 as we saw fit. The .world admins, on the other hand, were.
We know, hence this part of the OP:
...
But it was a problem, so we addressed it.
I addressed this here.
We are people with our own lives and shit to deal with. We cannot respond to every reply, but I've given the 196 community an overwhelming amount of my time to address what I can, and I'm continuing to do so.
Which isn't to say I didn't respond to every comment, but if a new concern came up that wasn't addressed in the OP, I responded to the first person to bring it up. My comment history for the past few days is evidence of this.
To speak frankly again, I've exhausted myself with how much time I've put into responding to all of the concerns. But if you feel like you have more that wasn't addressed then just say it. I'll be here, and I'll always be willing to continue sacrificing my free time for the sake of you guys understanding what happened, why, and what we are doing differently so there are no problems in the future.
I'm sorry, but I disagree for the reasons stated above. Kolanaki was banned because he was frustrated with trans people, and that is not a crime. Trans people are people, and people are frustrating sometimes. I don't see any reason to invalidate his feelings, and he should be free to express them.
This was already addressed here, and I encourage you to read Ada's reply and my reply to her. Long story short, I did tell people about this months ago in an effort to be more transparent with the community, and I was in favor of a vote, but due to some misunderstandings with Ada I had to remove what I said.
What I didn't say in that comment, though, was that the mods didn't even have time to realize or interject when the change was being made without notice.
Addressed in the previous two paragraphs, and in many of my comments elsewhere.
Addressed here and in this post.