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(thelemmy.club)
I made a very similar post to this on the LW Announcement post, but this has since been slightly edited and fleshed out. But... for those unaware...
A user by the name of Luminous was an admin on Anarchist.nexus. They banned MrKaplan from a community for 'posting zionist apologia.' Luminous also had 'Murder all Zionists' as their display name. MrKaplan took this as a personal death threat. Instead of speaking with any other admin from Anarchist.nexus and reporting the behavior, MrKaplan instantly defederated from Anarchist.nexus. In the next couple of days, Kaplan messaged other users/admins of Lemmy about the defederation and suggested defederation to others as well.
After being posted in the Piefed general chat, PugJesus pushed back against the defederation.
The conversation moves elsewhere.
So, I messaged Kaplan. Conversation goes on and one thing is made clear, that Kaplan did not reach out to any of the Admins of Dbzer0 or Anarchist.nexus until after defederation had occured.
LWAdmins made an announcement post discussing the defederation but the post was not featured unlike all other recent posts made by the LWAdmin account, which felt underhanded. To make matters worse, Serinus (a moderator with admin level abilities), proceeded to step into the conversation and start removing offending posts for reasons listing anything from "We've heard your opinion" to "Misinformation" when screenshots proved otherwise. I say he has Admin level access because @Goferking0@ttrpg.network was banned from the Instance by an Automod I (and Jordan Lund) previously had access to. It sort of sidesteps the Modlog by not logging who actually did the removal, which I'm not a huge fan of, but this was also admitted by Serinus in a comment where he said he was the one who banned them. This being the same Serinus who said this of defederating with Anarchist.nexus:
Kaplan later doubled down in the LemmyWorld Discord Server, after the conversation I had with them in which they admitted having exactly zero evidence for this stance other than it "feeling odd", by stating:
Ruud, the head admin of Lemmy.world, has had no feedback on this position. The only natural conclusion one can come to is that the LW Admin team (of which Serinus now seems to be a part of as he speaks for the admins in the admin community and has admin tools) are not just fully willing to act based off of knee-jerk reactions, but aren't capable of communicating with other admins on issues that they may have with their instance. Or that they only will confer with you if your instance has enough users for them to consider a valid one.
Now, they have refederated with Anarchist.nexus since this situation but they haven't backed down from the threat of defederation. This is much like every other major problematic issue that has been brought up in the past with Lemmy.world. Their admin team drags their feet for an absurd amount of time, despite rolling in reports about moderator abuse or whatever else, and then expects people to act with pre-cog abilities without them informing you of their problems with your instance. Also seem to be willing to police how good your reasoning is on how you feel about the situation to judge whether or not it's appropriate to defederate.
To paraphrase what Kaplan said in one of those screenshots, it is not my intention to control who can or can’t be on admin teams on another instance but I do expect other instances to understand that an individual admin’s actions reflect their instance as a whole. Something Ruud seems to not care about and something that Kaplan belives does not apply to themself. Overall, the primary response by the LW Admin team has been to frame AN and Dbzer0 as either a small instance that “only has 165 users” or "only 71 monthly users" or a “vocal minority with an agenda”. For 20,000 users.
How long before its your instance on the chopping block for not telling them exactly what they want to hear? How many of your users will be silenced by Lemmy.world for a perceived sleight against them?
What Luminous did was idiotic and troll-esque. But what Kaplan is doing is considerably worse.
I don't think I have to state where I stand on this.
The only thing I've ever said to him was pushing back against his criticism with screenshots of evidence that proved him wrong.
He is not removing people for a coordinated harassment campaign. He is removing people to silence dissent and exert a stranglehold on his platform and his own ego.
PTB is, quite literally, not strong enough. He is an active danger to the entire fediverse as a whole. He is dragging down credibility of any instance that runs Piefed and has proven that not only is he a manchild incapable of regulating his own emotions and ego.
Piefed has become Chernobyl levels of radioactive. You can keep running a Piefed instance but you better expect questions on why you're helping to further this narcissistic psychopaths control and influence.
It's also kind of strange that Iso@lemy.lol is on that list. They're a former admin of lemy.lol who had beef with Rimu but Rimu defederated from lemy.lol a while ago over their logo. The fact that he's banning that user in amongst all the others kind of proves that this is a personal hitlist and not harassment. Otherwise, why are you banning a user that you've defederated from?