this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Reddit Migration

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I just suddenly found my user over there banned. Not for getting in a fight or breaking any rules, but just for criticizing and asking questions regarding its recent vague Terms of Service. In fact, no reason, warning, or reply was given beforehand, and the admin who did it suddenly scaled to banned, with no reply or anything sent to email.

It seems to be because of some criticism I made regarding https://legal.lemmy.world/, where rather than answer it they deleted my entire user history and implied that the criticism was:

reason: disagreeing with the Terms of Service - don't worry your content is gone

Note that I never explicitly disagreed with the Terms of Service, but I guess they must consider any criticism of it disagreement.

It hardly matters when they've made sure to make it my word versus theirs by eliminating my entire user history. This should be a big hint about how they will treat you, your comment history, and your ongoing discussions, even those unrelated to the ban, and it shows just how shit they will be at transparency when it happens (be sure to use the Internet Wayback Machine on them).

A lot of my criticisms had to do with permabans and how they would carry them out, so I guess I have my answer - in the worst way imaginable it without recourse, control, or even the possibility of getting it lifted.

What they say under 6.2, it's all deception, "what may happen" when the reality is they won't mind completely banning you on the spot. They won't give you a warning and tell you not to repeat it. There won't be any sort process. They will just ban you and remove your comment history on the spot. They will throw your entire history of content down the drain, and laugh while making a snarky comment. It's even worse than reddit, then, but that was always a risk, specially given who's heading Lemmy's development and given the apparent lack of concrete details regarding its leadership.

I suppose I'll try kbin.social now. ~~On the off-chance that somebody has of knows of where there could be a cache of the comment I made where they claim I was "disagreeing with the Terms of Service", I would appreciate it.~~ Oh, never mind, found it - that was easy: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]

Here's the link to the modlog removal, because there seem to be a lot of connection problems now and the latest one is missing a lot of admin actions, including those that purged and banned my account:

Then: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog

Now: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog

NOTE: Apparently it is still there, it just has to be searched for through a more precise filter. It isn't clear how or why it gets removed. However, it is now clear who performed the ban, and it is the person I suspected: https://web.archive.org/web/20231104183117/https://sh.itjust.works/comment/5112860 Plus it seems the two most active admins are very close: https://web.archive.org/web/20231105083850/https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/567901/Sipping-mist-from-a-bag-to-get-high-feels-so#entry-comment-3163448

I've submitted a ticket, whose link leads to a service hosted on mastodon.world: https://imgur.com/a/aisRzL9

The result? Closed without a reply: https://imgur.com/a/6PK1elq

NOTE: I was finally able to contact Ruud, contact as in get him to join the same Matrix PM chat as me and direct him to this post, but that was basically it. Complete silence and not even a courtesy "I will look into it", so within their bubble of narcissism. I'm going to guess he's already quite aware and ok with the "sweep under the rug" approach. In contrast, they were quite quick to ban me from the Matrix chat after joining and waving hello, yet not so quick to provide a reason except that of a circlejerked "yeah just ignore, because look at all the other dirt on the carpet".

Lemmy.world seems to be corrupt at the core, at it will likely continue to fool a lot of people for years to come.

As of today, two months later, no apology from lemmy.world, my kbin.social account still remains banned. Even though they've removed the admin responsible there's no apology and you wouldn't know about it or even begin to guess why if you didn't look under the covers ( https://i.imgur.com/En7roiG.png ), because the other admins are complicit in sweeping it under for the appearance of acting legitimately that they wouldn't ever dare an apology from the hole they've dug themselves into.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had suspicions about lemmy.world since it started to become a big player inside of lemmy. Now those suspicions became real. That, and the fact that an instance with the domain .world is more US than world. Thanks for the info.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this pretty much wasn't an accident, they just also banned this user, one I had created long before the ban, because of:

reason: Ban evasion

While having no problem doing that, what they haven't done is replied directly or addressed the ticket I sent them, so any benefit of the doubt is pretty much extinguished on my side.

It's clear to me they want to sweep it under the rugs on the hope that controlling the narratives on the most popular lemmy instance works out for them. This was probably what they intended by purging my account all along, thankfully they didn't seem to keep in mind the nuances of the fediverse which has still allowed me to keep evidence and my user account history despite their worst instincts.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The admins are straight up people that could be from lemmygrad, like how the fuck are they worse than Lemmyml...

Come to Shitjustworks, we are great. TheDude is cool.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

holy shit, I've been reading this url as "sh, it just works" for MONTHS and was super ??? about what it meant. I only just now realized it's "shit just works" and......oh. that makes a lot of sense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So many filthy tankies infesting the other instances. You're almost guaranteed to spot one even outside of .ml now, which is where I'd hoped they'd remain to save the rest of us from having to deal with their authoritarian bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, i mean hexbear is a thing sadly, i just block them all. They are a plague.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

sopuli admin tends to be pretty chill too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml both suck ass, then that pretty much means that 90%+ of all communities are straight up gone. Which means at this stage one might just go back to fucking Reddit. Because what's the point of having shitty admins and no communities?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can just go to smaller instances that don't monopolize lenmy...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's already a lack of communities int he fediverse, and you want me to sit there in some, if they even exist, that get maybe a thread within 2-6 weeks? What's the point in that?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If all people thought like you do, then the fediverse wouldn't exist at all. No mastodon, no peertube, no pixelfed, nothing. Because it seems easier to complain instead of to collaborate in its growth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That’s like inviting me to six different parties at the same time, then telling me I’m the problem when I suggest there aren’t enough people here to have a party.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean then go to reddit if you don't want to contribute and just to complain...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wonderful reply. /s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can post to their communities from any instance. They have no way to enforce "ban evasion" so it is ridiculous they are even using that term.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not sure how it works, because there was a comment on a thread regarding youtube ads that I noticed I couldn't view after trying to reply to a notification of a kbin.social user comment on it, and I couldn't get to my comment no matter how hard I tried. Now I can, for some reason, but there's no comment to reply to!? But it does seem that lemmy.world can at least limit the visibility of my comments to the local kbin.social instance.

But in regards to new users, I just tried to create a user in the lemmy.world instance, and they added a textbox so you had to agree to do so. So I just went and created it in another instance that didn't force me to agree with the Terms of Service.

To be fair, it's not a bad idea, they can just finish implementing it by trying to require users agree to it before they can participate in the instance's community without visibility penalties, so my general view of it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6BYzLIqKB8

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I mean, that's why I'm hosting my own instance, then I own my own content.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Maybe I'll have to try it out, thanks for the idea.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm thinking of hosting an instance as well. Do you have any tips?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think nowadays it's pretty easy if you go the ansible way because that seems the most official one. I'm doing the docker way manually and then I need to fix the Dockerfile every time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Would love to hear more about the ansible way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My experience with lemmy.world has this as par for the course. They've... got some interesting moderators.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Their team is more than one person, so I'm trying to see if I can get a reply from their email in case I can get a more reasonable answer. I have little hope of it, they seem to be a pretty small team (relatively speaking) and I get the impression it was the same person who wrote the Terms of Service.

Funnily enough, another user who was actually being rude in the same thread got banned a few hours earlier but had his comment history as well as the taunts he made in the thread left untouched, showing much more willingness on their part to maintain and even drop down to that level of discourse. I'm not even sure why they are bothering with a Terms of Service if they are just winging it and don't even care about maintaining appearance.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At this point Lemmy feels like a failed experiment. I really wanted to like it, but when the admins of the biggest instance are this terrible I don't know how it can recover.

Also 90% of the engagement and content is around non-original memes. There is nothing on Lemmy that isn't somewhere else which means there is no reason to join Lemmy as of yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Nah, just join a different instance. You see a lot of the same stuff. As for content I don't see that. Risa is hilarious for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not a Star Trek fan I take it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, they seem to be dialing up the internet dictatorship. Shame, because it's always been one of the only instances with any "general" (non niche and non-geographical) activity to speak of.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think the admin who's to blame is acting like a dictator, they are acting more like a narcissist with a fragile ego who deceive themselves when they do something wrong. A total spez, if you will, whom people should have no doubts about calling out when they put themselves in position of power.

The problem is, they had no problem deleting months and history of comments and because they aren't willing to recognize what they did wrong or the circumstances that led up to it, it is likely they won't have a problem going full-on psychotic in the future as well, and that is a very toxic foundation upon which the most popular lemmy instance founded upon. Reddit is proof that it won't stop the growth or persistence of the platform, but you will get things like the whole Reddit API debacle. People and developers might better spend their time contributing to other instances.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Lemmy is ran by tankies, not surprised.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are plenty of other instances out there with different policies and different approaches to moderation. I live in the US, but I use lemmy.ca. Their writeups said that it is not restricted to Canadians. My experiences here have all been positive. Very nice people.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It is very much appreciated!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I fucking knew and had a sense that lemmy.world would be contaminated with the redditard disease. Hopped ship when I started noticing the similar content, the similar behavior and realized "hm, this is becoming more and more like Reddit".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

what does don't worry your content is gone mean

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They purged my entire comment history before the ban, probably because they didn't like the last paragraph of my criticism here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]

So it's basically an attempt to mock me because I brought up the concern in a thread where they said they were open to concerns. Fortunately I was still able to archive it because federated also means those purges aren't propagated the same way through different instances.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

the good thing about decentralized social media is that, if an admin one one instance is being a dick, you can move to another. imagine if that admin ran every single instance? in the way that reddit has one ruler. thankfully, it's not like that here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Doesn't matter if everyone crowds around the largest communities and the admins have complete access and view control over them, at least for what I'm looking for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey OP, are you covered by the GDPR or CCPA?

If so perhaps you could ask for a copy of your data that lemmy world has on your former accounts, and report to the regulator if they ignore your request. Not sure if federation helps or hurts - like could you say that lemmy world must have something of your data since other federated servers still have a copy of your content?

Would be nice if there was a way to use the GDPR here to bring some addtional accountability to the lemmy world admins.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They purged the account and claimed that no other data is kept. I suppose I could present it against kbin.social, but my problem is the exact opposite, that they purged my comment history based on a lie that now both admins are keeping relatively quiet about hoping they can sweep it under the rug behind the curtains. I don't want to hurt kbin.social, now would I want to hurt the Internet Wayback Machine. It's thanks to both that I have proof of what really happened and that the claim they are standing behind is a lie.