Thank you all for doing this.

Not my instance, but after perusing those links, what's the point? "Generally" this, "generally" that, paired with vague obligations. Doesn't matter a bit if you have an actual problem with a member of the administration time and the rest buddy up and play silent.

Let me ask you this, you've been up for quite a while, you've had staff rollovers, you must have had issues with at least one of your admins. Have you been transparent about them and reached out to anyone who might have been affected by them and publicly apologized and addressed any actions on their behalf, or have you played coy and just ignored them and kept quiet about them, releasing at best only excuses that have kept any internal drama hidden lest they affect the donation/income streams?

Not really launching any accusations, but actions speak louder than words. Look at Reddit, it has a decent community guideline, and it means shit except whitewashing when it comes to actual enforcement.

It's not the same thing, but IMO the best things the admins can do is establish a runbook of sorts of how to deal with these situations - because they're not out of the realms of possibility.

Where I disagree with some is in the rules needing to be black and white. There are instances, say for example a self-harming support group or a community that deals with conditions with no medical cure. IMO this is where nuance is key, because people will share misinformation or procedures that could cause harm/illness. This is where a case by case basis is needed, and ultimately the "path of least harm" is where this will excel. Regardless, admins and mods should contribute to these runbooks for their case, so that there is an established plan that is transparent to all.

I love the strong emotional takes on what is animal abuse from all the meat eaters in here.

My goodness.

What a mess. Thank you mods and admins for doing the work.

And now the incident's "debate" is here.

This is so dumb of course it's a controversy about veganism. It's so obvious that no imminent harm is coming from a community literally founded on the idea of reducing suffering. Probably switching instances sometimes soon

I'm not vegan so I won't take sides in this particular debate (to me it seems like a trolley problem whether risking the harm of a pet is worth reducing the systematic harm of animals at-large), nor do I have any specific comments on the new rules...

I will say though, that these incidents are opportunity for growth and learning for both users and admins when it comes to running a grassroots online community. Whether people agree with the new rules or not, I think all of Lemmy is better for it if we have examples of how large instances can be run and how conflicts can be addressed cordially.

This rogue admin was absolutely not acting with the best intentions. Is he kicked out of the admin team?

He was abusing the term "misinformation" even though it was extremely obvious that he had a personal vendetta against vegans. A vegan pet diet is perfectly possible, and vegans were merely saying that. There was no question for a source by anybody, because the source is just a simply google search away.

This admin is just anti vegan and was on a personal vendetta. He saw an opportunity to classify it as misinformation, so he just started removing posts and banning people. Why was /c/Vegan specifically targeted by this person?

"Oh but this vegan diet for your pet might hurt it!!", bro you're literally the one paying others to slaughter living beings.

Lmao all this over meat eaters getting mad at vegan cat food? I'm genuinely impressed that redditors are managing to turn Lemmy into a caricature of the godawful website they left.

GG

This is why I left .world in the first place, and that was even when their censorship was understandable. That’s the beauty of Lemmy.

Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.

Note that even if a study is currently reproducible, it will only continue to be reproducible until it isn't. There isn't something fundamental that makes a specific scientific study objectively true or false — that isn't how science works.

When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.

I understand that that's likely well-intentioned, but, imo, it's rather subjective — it's more often a matter of relative perspective. That being said, it would be in your best interest to set as clear and precise definitions as you possibly can.

Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.

What does this statement mean? You are banning anyone from sharing anything that is not peer-reviewed…?

We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance

That's a bit of a stretch.

People will go to any lengths to justify their bad behaviour to themselves.

All you need to do is not interfere in communities where you have no idea what you’re talking about, stop assuming you know better than everyone else just because you have some power over a meaningless message board. This isn’t an anti-vax community we’re talking about here and you’ve totally blown this way out of proportion to prevent admitting that the moderator was out of line.

You, the mod/admin exist to stop spam and hate speech and to empower users with tools and features that they want and find useful. Otherwise, just stay the fuck out of the way. Do not impose your will on your little petty fiefdoms, that is unwanted and unhelpful.