Hello World,
as some of you might be aware, there have been various accusations against one of our former community team members, Jordan Lund.
We have removed Jordan as a member of our community team a week ago, on 23rd of September, due to various behavior that we do not consider acceptable for a member of our team. We haven't posted about this earlier, as we're still in the progress of reviewing and making decisions, and we originally expected to be able to conclude this earlier, within a time frame where we could have presented the final outcome in the first post.
During his time with Lemmy.World, Jordan has been helping out our team with various admin-level tasks, as well as moderating a few large communities, including !news@lemmy.world, !world@lemmy.world and !politics@lemmy.world. As far as we can tell, most of his actions, including moderation actions, were in alignment with both our instance rules and also rules and spirit of the affected communities.
Unfortunately, this does not apply to all his actions. We have identified multiple cases of conduct that do not align with what we expect from members of our team. We currently do not have any explicit rules or code of conduct for our community team or other team members like instance admins on top of our ToS/bylaws, as we expected to have a common understanding of acceptable behavior. In the past we already had discussions with Jordan about some of this behavior and we believed that to be enough at that time. Going forward, we will be working on a code of conduct applicable to all members of our team, including community team and anyone above.
Being a member of our community team provides additional privileges for selected members, such as the ability to appoint community moderators, update our community spotlight or even banning users. In Jordan's case this included permissions to appoint community moderators and ban users from the instance.
As of today, we are not aware of misuse of these additional privileges. Once we have reviewed other actions taken by Jordan we will also review these types of actions taken by Jordan in the recent past. If you believe that you or someone else was incorrectly banned from Lemmy.World, you're welcome to appeal your ban by reaching out to our team. As we currently have some technical issues with our ticket system, I recommend sending an email to report at lemmy dot world for the time being, visting our Matrix room #general:lemmy.world or reaching out to @MrKaplan@lemmy.world directly, also possible via Matrix at @mrkaplan:lemmy.world.
Following our instance rules, we have a few cases in which we may remove community moderators from their communities:
- Grossly committing a violation of the Terms of Service
- Acting repeatedly against the local community rules
- Extended periods of inactivity, as evident by lack of public interaction and/or failure to respond to reports
We are still discussing whether we consider his behavior a "gross violation of our ToS", as there are definitely some arguments to be made in favor of that. This includes for example using incorrect gendered pronouns, which we will update in our ToS in the coming days to make it more clear to everyone that this will not be tolerated. Due to his previous and current position we are still discussing what our final resolution to this issue will be as far as instance rules are concerned. Whether or not a person is trolling does not justify using incorrect pronouns for them. We have also informed Jordan that we expect his behavior in this regard to change immediately.
We're currently also in conversations with other moderators of communities moderated by Jordan to review their position on his behavior within their communities and whether they believe that his actions in those communities were appropriate and in line with the community rules. As a reminder, the order of community moderators in the sidebar has direct impact on the moderator hierarchy, where a moderator listed earlier is able to remove any moderators later in the list. This means even if an action might not (yet) be taken by instance admins, other community moderators may be able to remove moderators if they're no longer desired to be part of the team. Especially community rules about civility and respectful conduct do not appear to have been followed in a number of cases, and we are reviewing with the community moderators whether this is in line with other content they would usually moderate/not moderate.
It should also be noted that not all things reported to us are actually or clearly violating our rules, even if we may not agree with them. For example, we currently do not have rules about moderators removing other people's arguments, especially as "misinformation", to strengthen their own misguided arguments, and then continue to accuse the other side of misinformation later on. We do expect our team members to not use positions of power to "win arguments" or falsely accuse others of misinformation, when this isn't actually the case. Therefore, while this example is not something we tolerate for members of our team, having this happen on community level (by a person who isn't also holding a role above community mod at that time) is currently not something we are enforcing.
Once we have worked out a CoC for members of our team, we will post about this separately and also gather community feedback on whether you believe that enforcement of that (or parts of it, or more things) should also include moderators of Lemmy.World communities.
Additionally, we will also be looking at expanding our community team a bit in the near future, as we have both lost some people over time and recently also Jordan. We will also be posting about this separately, currently expected to be in a few weeks, with a description of expectations and responsibilities.
We will also be updating this post over the coming days until we have finished our review and actions.
Update 2025-10-06 01:27 UTC:
After reviewing various comments and actions by Jordan, he has received a warning, especially relating to following our rules at https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#1-attacks-on-people-or-groups. Going forward, if we see additional violations of our rules, especially when it comes to attacking others, we will consider additional consequences in the form of a temporary or permanent ban. If you still see Jordan's behaving in ways violating our ToS, please report this directly to us, e.g. through a pm to @lwreport@lemmy.world. We always review messages received by this account in our team.
In line with our current rules about potentially removing community moderators, we have reviewed the communities Jordan is currently a moderator in:
- !politics@lemmy.world: This community has active moderators above Jordan Lund, such as @aidan@lemmy.world.
- !news@lemmy.world This community has active moderators above Jordan Lund, such as @JonsJava@lemmy.world.
- !world@lemmy.world: We have moved Jordan from being top moderator to being bottom moderator. New top moderator is @Tenthrow@lemmy.world.
- !business@lemmy.world: No other active mods
- !comicbooks@lemmy.world: No other active mods
- !portland_oregon@lemmy.world: No other active mods
- !thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world: We have moved Jordan from being top moderator to being bottom moderator. New (active) top moderator is @JonsJava@lemmy.world.
- !hottubs@lemmy.world: No other active mods
- !keeptrack@lemmy.world: No other active mods
Any community moderator above Jordan will be able to remove him from his moderator position, should they decide that he is not a good fit for the community. It is up to those community moderators whether they want to keep him on the team.
We generally intend to limit our involvement in community moderation to enforcement of instance rules. Without disallowing other community mods to add Jordan back as a moderator, there would also not be much impact of removing him entirely, as they could just add him back right away. If you do not agree with the rules in a community or the way it is moderated, it's always possible to look for alternative communities with different rules, different mods, or creating your own community.
Having said this, we're still working on our team CoC, and will be gathering community feedback in a standalone post to determine whether we should enforce additional standards for community moderators.
Our review of Jordan's delegated admin actions (instance bans) are still pending. Unless we find evidence of this having been abused, we we do not currently expect additional consequences to arise from this.
I don't have that experience. In the before JL times it was worse, and there where no clear rules set. He and his then team set up some clear rules with the mod team then, discussed them openly with the community, and was strict with the following the rules but usually pretty consistent afaik. That's quite a rare and important attribute in modding. Doesn't mean I always agreed, but then that's impossible. With some people in certain instances and commnuties any sort of good conversation is almost impossible. So there are always some unhappy ones.
Well that's my take. Don't have all the bits of his " mod casefile" and that's not of my business.. He's always operated in good faith and haven't seen any weird mod shit from him. Good mod.
Jordan making small good changes doesn't change the fact he acts like he knows better, then bans anyone who proves him wrong.
Just speaking on my own here, if I'm allowed to do that. Not as a representative of LW.
JL is generally a pretty good mod who has provided a lot of value to his communities. He's right 90% or more of the time. He's put a lot of work into Lemmy, and many people don't appreciate how much work it takes to be a good moderator of something like !news. He's great... until you question him. Then he goes full reddit-mod.
In my opinion, being questioned is part of having authority.
You can go where you want from all of that. I think there's a decent range of opinions on those combinations that are valid.
I'll also say that at least half of Stamets post is bullshit if you read past the surface. JL is not actually racist. Read the article accusing him of such and decide for yourself. Not liking protests that block the roads of Seattle doesn't make you racist.
I don't think he's Zionist, but on Lemmy any mod who bans you for shouting "Death to X" is zionist or a fascist.
He enforced a rule about not using link aggregators or news reposting sites (yahoo, msn) as sources. I think that's a totally valid rule, but any time he enforced it the OP would assume he's censoring their agenda. When all he really required was a valid source.
But Stamets won't be happy until he gets what he wants. He's shouted righteously, and if you don't follow him, you don't deserve him. He'll keep laying baseless accusations on top of his valid ones until you HAVE TO do what he says.
The narrative here has run away a bit. There's of course many seeds of truth here. I'm just asking y'all to be a little careful in how much of it you take at surface value. A few people have definitely made a mountain out of a... well... a hill here. And hills can vary quite a bit in size.
I can only speak from my own experience, since I don't have any other, and I haven't seen nor experienced directly any weird stuff.
But it's clear that some users have a negative experience, and they have elaborately stated their case. One can acknowledge that.
But one experience doesn't make the other untrue , though I'm not personally invested like others seem to be. Also, changing or dethroning a mod, won't solve too much of the long-term problems large community have, imo. Remember, that they do it all free and they don't get paid nor a sponsorship out of this. That's why I feel this subject requires proper attention and a balanced approached to find out what has happened. I can only trust that @ Kaplan and @ Ruud and their people, are doing exactly that
If he's an asshole for free that doesn't exactly change anyone's opinion of him. He can stop doing it any time if it's bad for his health.
Instead he bans anyone who wants him to correct his mistakes when proven wrong. And then the admin team cover up for him, as they have for years.
I'm an asshole too sometimes. I admit mistakes and learn from them. Jordan seemingly can't without being smug.