It might be to avoid impersonation.

Most of the misinformation communities are easy to spot, but [email protected] falls into a slightly different category, and it presents itself in an unusual way. It seems like one of the main mods flavors his postings with a consistent sprinkling of posts that say that Europe not buying fossil fuels from Russia is a catastrophe for Europe, and they must reverse course as soon as possible and stop trying to depend on renewable energy, since it doesn't work.

Here are some examples from a most recent post. It's far from the only post that includes this general shape and character, but it's particularly on the nose. From https://lemm.ee/post/49292464:

That will leave Europe with expensive LNG from Qatar and the US, as well as some pipeline gas from Norway and through Turkiye, which is Russian gas in a roundabout, third-party way. As always: higher complexity comes at a higher price — a direct consequence of the EU’s economic war on its largest energy supplier.

With the predictable unpredictability of wind and solar, however, and with a massive reliance on natural gas fired power plants to balance electricity demand, Europe has just saw the fastest drop in natural gas storage in years. Yes, the weather was cold in the past couple of weeks, but it wasn’t nearly as cold as it could get in the dead of winter. Wind on the other hand stopped blowing, which not only resulted in lower electricity generation from wind turbines, but also in thicker clouds and more persistent fog… Leading to a much diminished solar power generation. Welcome to the good old Dunkelflaute (or the dark doldrums) so common this time of year, and by the way sometimes throughout the entire winter... Who could have thought that “renewables” produce much less electricity during wintertime…?

Whenever a large solar farm returns production it sends a shock wave through the grid, damaging sensitive equipment nearby. Similarly, when a cloud suddenly blocks the Sun a micro-blackout could occur (lasting a few milliseconds) till back up capacity comes online. These fluctuations in the supply of electricity has forced many companies with sensitive manufacturing equipment to install surge protectors and uninterruptible power supply units costing tens or hundreds of thousands of Euros (depending on size) or outright buying a natural gas powered generation unit to produce their own stable electricity supply.

In the meantime, and just for the record, the IMF has just named Russia the 4th largest economy of the world, surpassing Japan and Germany; after the World Bank classified it as a high income country. Despite all protestations, sanctions actually helped Russia rein in its worst oligarchs and encouraged investments to replace lost imports. Contrary to what Europe’s ruling elite had in mind, their policy has lead to a huge economic boom in Russia, driven by internal consumption and powered by an abundant supply of fossil fuels.

I asked the mod about what was up with this, on an earlier post, and they didn't seem to have much of a response other than an appeal to authority. (https://lemm.ee/post/49069993)

Obviously, I could be right or wrong, and no one's obligated to answer my questions about anything, but at that point I was looking at it as "You may be unintentionally posting misinformation" and warning the person, and their response didn't line up for me with someone who is innocently posting informative content because they believe it to be true.

Edit 1: Post in Question and first message added

Edit 2: The Moderators of [email protected] did the right thing by adding no charities to rule 5, my respect has been restored.

Cross-posted from "Announcement regarding the instance..." by @[email protected] in [email protected]

It is with great sadness that i write this. however The Admin team has parted ways. I have closed registrations, and disabled the option to create new communities. The server will be ran until the payments dry up (about ~1-2 months). We have tried to build a community for autistic people online. It ended up not working for which we apologize. Please do not go after the other team members. Some disappeared, some went their ways, but whatever the reason i wish them the best. If you have any questions, leave them here and i will try to answer them.

Elia Ayoub's profile (on spore.social) was hidden by mastodon.social moderators just the day his post about the ICC arrest warrants on Netanyahu got into "Explore" page.

To check yourself, visit https://mastodon.social/ and type @[email protected] into search.

UPD (2024-11-26): mastodon.social has stopped hiding this profile.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22298719

Image credit in original post :)

After being harassed in multiple discord channels by powermod FlyingSquid the news mod blackbeard has shuttered his account and moved to bluesky.

https://ibb.co/cY44MgF

https://lemmy.world/u/Blackbeard

"The recklessness with which people downvote polite disagreements reminds me of all the worst parts of Reddit, and it proves to me that this isn't the social media savior I'd hoped it would be, and is instead just another echo chamber. I hope eventually lemmy.world (and the fediverse more broadly) can grow out of that, but some of the behavior I've seen on the inside from both mods and admins doesn't really inspire much confidence for that kind of evolution in the short term. "

FlyingSquid is the same mod who has the power to siteban people from lemmy.world

Why does lemmy.world keep having issues with their powermods and admins? Why do powermods get the ability to siteban their enemies from the largest instance?

Suppose you've come across someone running the place and there are examples of a case that can be made that they've broken rules. What next?

Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)

The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.

Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.

However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their "drama communities" as well.

Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them

After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)

In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.

There's also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts "as a bit" using wording that they were not aware is misgendering ("fella") which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the "bit doing" during this heated period.

This "struggle session" is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.

EDIT: Even lemmygrad is wondering what the hell is going on

The removed comment

Moderator of ye powertripping bastards allows Lemmy.World moderators to lie and slander all over the place but does not appreciate those Moderators being called out on their lies.

After removing this post calling out Lemmy.World for banning users criticizing Kamala Harris, DB0 moderator also banned me from their instance.

And this is the Hexbear reply thread. Please be very wary of the extremism and bigotry and know that they are largely defederated

I think they've been watching too much porn.

I'm not going to name names here, because there's multiple places doing this and also I forgot what instance I saw it on, but I've noticed something disturbing with the automated repost bots. You know, those bots that copy whole Reddit communities over to Lemmy with tons of automated posts? I don't like them in general because when I reply to a post I like the OP to actually see my reply, but this issue is more ethical. It's the automated duplication of porn from Reddit to Lemmy.

Now, I know that these models have consented to their images being shared on the internet. However, in my own personal opinion, porn models should have some amount of control over the manner in which their image is shared on a public forum. In this case, the people posting their naked bodies do not have control over how the image is shared. They can't decide to delete it if they revoke consent later, and they can't report creepy comments on their pictures. In most cases, they probably don't even know what Lemmy is, and yet their images are getting search indexed and shared with people. There's no creative control over the distribution by the person whose body is in the picture. I consider that a form of non-consensual intimate media. I don't think these bots should be allowed to repost porn without asking the permission of the user who originally shared the media.

It's also funny that rather than removing all of my comments, they just decided to remove those I referenced and one particular reply, meaning whoever they were they cared more about the narrative and making the conversation unintelligible so that in the framing that was left people could just fill in the gaps just based on the downvotes and the accusations.

Like I said to some people and now extend to the mod,

I love how people like you are the flip side equal of Trump people warping reality to shit on it. Same bullshit, both sides aren't equal but people like you certainly resemble them closer.

ITT, people who couldn't comprehend cult psychology (and given the inherent Stanford prison experiment abuse within it, any psychology) or even the inevitable conclusion of what they are claiming and accuse me for being ignorant of what I'm literally alluding to in the first comment.

Even supposing that there was some legitimacy to the removals, it's telling how selective it was and where it wasn't. And literally labeling nuance "trolling" in a circlejerk meme reddit ... probably makes sense. But still, imagine being so fragile the huge number of downvotes could not do it for you.

Some of you really want to divide society as much as MAGA does. My message didn't neatly fit into the circlejerk meme, so I guess I must be "trolling, or worse" - amazing.

I can also confirm, can't delete or edit the comments to provide context, but people can still vote on comments that have been removed. Huh, didn't think I'd find something like this reddit was so clearly better at. So now I guess I know why they decided to selectively remove comments and framed the thread into what has been left.

Will it be effective?

EDIT: The banning event continues. Please consult the modlog to observe.

https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&modId=7121342

If you scroll down to about a day ago, you might be able to observe an emerging behavior from this mod.

EDIT 2: The mod in question moderates a total of 108 Lemmy communities. How deep does this conspiracy run? Is this mod a lost Redditor? More to come!

EDIT 3: The mod has now removed my comment all together, one might assume because it was still receiving upvotes in the 2 hours following my ban. Are there similarities here to Watergate? You be the judge!

EDIT 4: The mod in question has now been removed as a mod of the [email protected] community, as a result of their abuse of power.

https://lemmy.world/post/19731457

This was their response:

EDIT 5: This will be my final update, since as far as I see it, the issue this thread focuses on has been resolved. To quote Beaver herself in a very ironic comment she made directed towards someone else:

Clearly this was all just a case of...

That moment when, if I ever get banned from the ML instance, one might as well tell me to treat it as an extension of the act of fleeing while entrusting Archive Today and the victim to relay this message (totally becoming of the spokespeople for the people's liberation, /s also I would not voluntarily remove a thread of mine, so if this is gone by the time you get the archive...).

I consider myself a typical Orwellian person within the ML instance (fun fact, stands for Marxist-Leninist) who believes in the validity of debate, diplomacy, and standing up for oneself, having signed up for ML because the others were overcrowded when I was led to see Reddit as bad news due to the API (yet here I am). If I don't want to engage with someone, I leave, and if someone disobeys the rules of something I'm the admin of (not any instance), I ban them with tools already at my disposal (as opposed to actual attacks using tools not anyone's business, and that was after banning her). Sadly this isn't everyone. Worth mentioning on behalf of someone afraid of breaking rules against block evasion/retaliation, being the Orwellian I am who won't stand for things like the creed-based/LGBT discrimination I see. I see this (unauthorized username revelation and a false excuse of finding a rabbit hole) and I think "what's next, will admins threaten to reveal our passwords as the norm in due time". The US is on the verge of banning Tiktok for such shit, and here we are thinking of ourselves as invincible, like some cult.

When someone then mentions it on Reddit with her permission (and yes I have permission too), he shows up, claims she has the same name on 20 sites (when the dox that anyone can read clearly shows otherwise, and I did doublecheck his new claims, they're false again), and tries to demoralize the thread. I'm ashamed personal attacks and stealing info/photos is the norm for my brethren. And I'd bet a pretty big wager to prove me wrong, just to see if people would think they can.

This is out of hand, can we either overhaul admins or defederate ML considering all the threats of banishments make it dead weight? Because I feel like a sanction is in order.

17 days ago, @[email protected] banned @[email protected] from [email protected] for 2 weeks. The cited reason was Admitting to being a troll: "I'm an agent of chaos." lemmyshitpost does not have a rule against trolling, so even if this claim is true, there are still no grounds for a ban.

https://lemmy.ca/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&modId=729060&userId=391830

While we no longer have access to the thread in which this quote was allegedly said, the modlog would seem to indicate that it was related to this post, which shows a man complaining that he's never been privy to private conversations between girls and their fathers, and a dad mocking him in reply. The body furthermore elaborates in meme form that people are being misogynist in the comments.

Misogynists and other varieties of bigots often complain that the inclusion of women and minorities is political and divisive, and thus that we should not discuss feminism in polite company. Track_Shovel's meme is feminist, and FlyingSquid's problem with Track_Shovel appears to contain the same essence - that Track_Shovel's feminist posting is apparently intended to create conflict; the definition of trolling.

FlyingSquid's association between being an agent of chaos, and posting with intent to create offense, is an unfounded leap in logic. Chaos is actually an important religious concept, so influential that it forms one of the pillars of the morality system in Dungeons and Dragons, alongside Law, Good, and Evil. Back in the real world, various religions have painted chaos as either bad or good, depending on the values of the religion. Many religions describe chaos as a primordial force predating the gods' creation of the world. The Greeks venerated, or at least respected, the chaos goddess Eris. Discordianism, a cult originating in the 1960s, worships both Eris and the concept of chaos.

FlyingSquid has a history of mod abuse when the topic of religion is raised. In this post, FlyingSquid violates the rules of a community they themselves mod, concerning hate speech against religions. This ban fits into that pattern. Track_Shovel has the religious right to worship and to act on behalf of chaos, however they see it, as long as they do not harm anyone else. Their post to lemmyshitpost was not harmful, and was offensive only to misogynists. Supporting women's freedoms and safety is consistent with the values of Discordianism and other chaos-worshipping religions, and is not trolling. FlyingSquid's analysis of the situation as being intended to get a reaction out of misogynists, rather than as intended to affirm the safety of women, dismisses women's safety and silences feminist speech.

U/[email protected] banned from dubvee.org for the reason

Ridiculous username makes me think I'm having a stroke

What a silly place.

I'm trying to work out why there are posts in here about users being banned from communities, when neither the user or the community are under their control. Is this being mirrored from somewhere, or is this something that's limited to what people on their instance see?

They are also, apparently, banning users that have never been to their instance.