IDK it seems like pretty clear animal abuse to me

I am not a vegan, but I do try to make food choices that are as ethical and healthy as I can... or at least as far as I can afford.

Cats are carnivores. Fact. This is not debatable. But I think you could also meet or exceed a cats nutritional needs from other sources. Whether those sources are readily available and whether a person is sufficiently meeting those needs... that's another can of worms.

Generally, I'd argue that if you are hell-bent on a vegan diet, then you should not own carnivorous pets. No matter how well meaning you are, there is a significant chance that you will inflict harm on your pet, and that is unacceptable.

All I'm getting from this entire saga is that vegans on here are lunatics. From forcing this nonsense on pets, to all of the follow-up, this is a very bad look for the community, from somone looking in from the outside.

This is some cultish behavior...

I think what people generally want is not reddit. The mods in reddit have almost no accountability from admin.

Oftentimes comments are removed just because a mod doesn't agree or like the content.

I was banned from r/Ukraine simply for saying we shouldn't demonize the entire population of Russia for the actions of their government. I later argued with the mod through their "arbitration process" and he would not unban me. (What really hurt is that I'm Ukrainian. It was an improvement sub for me)

No one wants that! Please don't let that happen here!

The comments in here are unbelievable. This post was about the systemic moderation issues that lead to the incident, the team's response to it, and how to deal with such a problems in the future.

Half the comments: CATS CAN'T EAT VEGAN

The other half: CATS CAN TOO EAT VEGAN

There are people here who need to go back to fucking reddit.

Animal abuse isn't an opinion. It's evil. And malice by ignorance that could be corrected is malice.

Stop apologizing for doing your jobs. We all have opinions and raise them loudly in the Fediverse so I understand your natural reaction and want to communicate well. But IMHO this is troll feeding. If they posted in favor of human genocide, you'd close a ticket, and move on, not write an apology for taking it down.

The integrity in this post is off the charts.

Love to see it.

Not that I think Rooki was wrong with what they did. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how fast such stuff can get out of control.

Thing happened. Admins reflected on thing. Came up with solution. Communicated solution with community in an understandable and transparent manner. Perfect.

If that lazy fucks over at Reddit would have been half as good as you with theirs jobs, we probably wouldn’t be here to begin with.

Wow. I have no involvement in the original issue and I'm definitely not as familiar with the circumstances and details as others. There may be a lot missing here.

But this feels like a very mature, logical, empathetic, well-intentioned response and the kind of thing I like to see.

Feeding a carnivore a vegan diet indeed is animal abuse. Cats can survive, but survival and healthy are not the same. Cats on a vegan diet get sick much faster and die younger, statistically according to vets. I'm a vegan, I have cats, I feed them meat. If you don't like feeding your pets meat, get a herbivore pet instead.

The way things were handled may have been wrong, but animal abuse should be banned from Lemmy imo.

There could be a technical fix for this. Lemmy could use a system that requires certain moderator and/or admin actions to require a 2-person authorization, and temporarily put the action in an “under review” state for a set amount of time.

For instance, an admin removing content would replace it with a placeholder for up to 2 days. If another admin accepts the change then the comment is removed. If no other admin responds then the content is put back.

This is pretty much Change Management.

I appreciate you guys owning up to this, especially since a lot of people here seemed determined to ignore the actual issue and just start a redditesque circle jerk about vegans.

I don't agree with the outcome of THIS situation, but I DO agree with the idea that mods and admins are not gods on the fediverse. I like the concept of checks and balances, even if I disagree with the ruling. The fact that it's not a god complex one person rule is better than what reddit has.

That being said, you can be vegan, but give your cat some chicken! Cats LOVE chicken! Why would you want to deprive your cat of what they love? If they were neighborhood cats, they would instinctually be killing birds ALL THE TIME!!! So it's not YOU killing the chicken. It's your cat. Don't like it? Don't get a cat.

I don't get a dog. Why? Because I'm never home. That would be unfair for a dog to just NEVER get to go for a walk, just because I'm home like 10 hours a day. And even that is mostly sleeping. Wouldn't be fair to the dog. Just like it's not fair to the cat to never have chicken.

Appreciate how you handled this, but denying a carnivore an appropriate diet is definitely animal abuse.

To be clear, while the idea that discussion is welcome is good the moderators of c/vegan do not tolerate discussion. Any opinion that goes against the orthodoxy of the echo bunker leads to a permanent ban. If you express any opinion other that, "It's fully acceptable to force your extremist philosophy on an obligate carnivore by feeding it an unnatural vegan diet" you will be banned. It's an incredibly closed minded and intolerant community.

To be totally honest you have nothing to apologize for. Dogs and cats are metabolically different to humans and cannot survive on a vegan diet unlike us. Forcing obligate carnivore pets on vegan diets is certainly animal abuse.

I remember when there was a growing campaign to ban r/nonewnormal on Reddit due to it being a hub of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this led to a blackout much like the later API protests.

Rather than read the room and introduce a new rule banning medical disinformation, Reddit's Tintin-looking moron of a CEO instead threw out tonnes of BS statistics on brigading likely plucked out of his own sphincter, and banned the subreddit because their activity exceeded this arbitrary percentage he made up.

And before you tell me this guy's figures were legit, aren't we forgetting that he pathologically lied about his interactions with the Sync developer? Spez is a snake.

I'm reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said "Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it".

If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don't axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.

As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don't have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.

A sensible, compassionate, gracious and humble response? I thought this was the internet?

@lwadmin For full disclosure I agree with rooki on this topic.

I may have missed it in the write up but I think the vegan mods needlessly escalated the situation by trying to ban and remove comments from an admin.

I am not saying I always agree with rooki but I respect his job as an admin.

The mods of vegan treated him disrespectfully in his capacity as an admin by deleting and banning him.

You should cover this in your terms of service.

The mods at the lemmy world vegan community don't see things the same way. From this post:

"Today the lemmy.world admins made a follow up post about the incident where the admin Rooki interfered with moderation of this community in a way which was determined to be against lemmy.world TOS and factually incorrect. Throughout this incident there has been no communication with me, nor to my knowledge any of of the other moderators of this community. Rooki quitely undid his actions and edited his post to admit fault however there was no public acknowledgement of this from him. In fact I wasn’t even told I was reinstated as a mod which is quite funny."

"The lemmy.world admins’ response appears more focused on managing their own reputations and justifying similar actions in the future than providing a good environment for vegans, and other similarly maligned groups. Their statements about wanting to handle misinformation and overreach better in the future ring a bit hollow when they won’t take actions to address the anti-vegan circlejerks under their update posts which abound with misinformation and disinformation."

"The legalese written basically allows for the same thing to happen, and that if it does the admin decision is to stand while moderators have to quietly resolve the conflict at the admins’ leisure. Presumably with a similarly weak public apology and barely visible record correction after the fact."

Codified anti-vegan bias based on reactionary views? That's unfortunate. Glad I'm not on that instance.

Can you people trying to restart the original argument take that shit elsewhere? This is a discussion about how to approach moderation.

Thank you for your measured, reasonable, and frankly reassuring response. I appreciate that moderation is a very difficult task and I want to thank all of you, both for your work and for how you've acted when faced with a difficult situation. This is exactly how I would've hoped this response would be. I do hope that your resolution to discuss these things beforehand can help avoid similar issues in the future.

All the vegans I meet in real life are normal ass people.

I've heard evidence that it was a fairly toxic community there anyway.

We should be careful to avoid creating communities that are echo chambers. Ie, it should be a community discussing veganism, not a vegan safe space where people abuse you if you disagree

Otherwise, in 5 years time you end to with scenarios similar to reddit or on beehaw

I left beehaw because I half agreed with the community, someone in a "safe space" abused me, and a beehaw admin overlooked that abuse and instead insisted I was starting a flight (simply because I didn't 100% agree with the community it seemed)

We also risk scenarios where vaping or drug communities could grow and become toxic in the same way. We also should be as scientific as possible and avoid becoming Facebook.

I'm not sure about the cat thing, but to me, it seems like it could at least be used as animal abuse

I love the compassionate intervention that allows @Rooki@lemmy.world the opportunity to learn and correct his behaviors and models that level of compassion. Thank you very much! 😊

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse

The comments have been restored

What... So the rules don't matter if enough people get angry, I see

Cats are not vegan lol

I'm guessing someone on /c/vegan took umbrage with the fact that cats are obligate carnivores and didn't want to hear anything else.

Edit: I find my upvote/downvote ratio unbelievable for this comment. Astounding how controversial facts are.