I've now probably read more posts about 196 on here than I've read posts on 196.
I'm just not really getting all the hate hate. These people started a community or worked their way into a mod spot. They had a specific set of rules for the community that was posted and reasonably fair. Their community got popular. They realized their site admin was modding their community according to rules that they didn't want to also enforce. They tried to move the community to a better fit instance as non-dramatically as they knew how.
That's all perfectly reasonable to me. Clearly they did a shit job at doing it non dramatically but they're communicating and adjusting their position to try and accommodate others and that alone should buy them a little good will. They are trying to figure out what to do, everyone is trying to figure out what to do. What's with all the hate?
From what I’ve seen it appears that (at least one of) the mods claim to “own” the community - which is a disturbing way of thinking about moderation, in my opinion.
Nah, it's one of the use cases for sites/services like reddit and lemmy.
A way to have a forum for your specific interest that you can build into the kind of community you want.
The barrier to hosting a standalone forum is very high. Prohibitively so. The time, the money, the level of skill needed.
Reddit, for a long time, treated subs exactly like that. It hosted your forum, and as long as you didn't do illegal shit, they would leave you alone. You owned it as much as you can own anything on someone else's hardware.
Lemmy is entirely a clone of reddit based in a reaction to reddit stopping that way of doing things.
The key to lemmy though, is that instances are individual reddits. You host the instance, you decide how "subs" are allowed to function. Some instances have a looser way of doing things, others are more hands on.
But, really, a moderator that creates a community should be as close to the owner of the community as you can get when it's hosted on someone else's hardware. You can try a fully democratic community, and they can work. But they don't work better than what amounts to a dictatorship model. It's just that it takes a higher number of people being jerks to fuck up a community when it's democratic. Organization by a panel is slower to adapt, and also more open to disruption because of that.
It's all about the benefits and drawbacks.
All of that is still trumped by the fact that whoever literally owns the instance can nuke, take over, ban, whatever any community or users. So it isn't like you can escape ownership without making a formally run instance with a legally binding structure. Without that, you still have to hope that the owner doesn't go crazy.
You're overlooking that the users don't want to move. The mods seem to think that they're the reason we use 196 and that they can just pack us into a suitcase and take us wherever they like, when the fact is we use blahaj zone for a reason and they can't take us anywhere. They're perfectly free to close the sub and make a new one elsewhere, but no one's going to follow them.
It's like, imagine you're renting a house with a few people and one of the people none of the housemates really like (they don't follow the house rules everyone has agreed on) marches in and announces "We all, as a group, are moving to Florida!" And then moves out and takes the refrigerator and expects you to follow. No thanks, good riddance, we're getting a new fridge and a better housemate.
I understand I'm being a pedant but it sounds more similar to a landlord telling their tenants that the house being rented is legally being moved across state borders. The landlord had house rules under the umbrella of state law and wanted a new umbrella. Tenants are saying "this state is fine and, fuck off, we brought all the furniture in this house."
I think the problem was the fact that they blocked the "old" community, despite a lot of people coming forward to actually keep the "old" community alive.
And then they unlocked the community. They fucked up and they apologized. Certain users really need to take a deep breath and stop writing essays on the topic calling for everyone's heads. It's giving off major Karen vibes, which belong as far away from c/196 as possible.
This is the internet, this is Lemmy, it's really not that big of a deal. Laugh about the drama, make memes about it, but for the love of God please stop taking everything so seriously.
This comment isn't directed towards you, but rather to a bunch of others I've seen from my cursory glance at a few threads, calling for everyone's resignation and expressing their outrage. Like calm the fuck down, you're embarrassing yourselves, and by extension the rest of us.
"as they knew how" is carrying a lot of weight there. Just reading through the responses to https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20937206, people were very incensed, and as people are saying here the mods responses are only making the already tense situation far worse.
Big detail you missed: the mods did not have accounts in blaj so the reports arrived pretty late. According to the admin there were several instances where there were days without anyone checking those reports, so they did to the best of their ability. This is not about the admin sniping reports but about being fed up of the big pile of reports no one was checking.
The admin would not have moderated the site if the actual mods did do their job and moderated it on time.
moss: “we don’t want to moderate under Ada”
us: “…. okay? then quit. there are plenty of us who will gladly take over. :)”
moss: “NO NO NOT LIKE THAT”
the mod aint wrong to not want to work under Ada and the community aint wrong for telling the mod to piss off, so the mod got to go imho
It would have been so easy for them to make some kind of thread or poll "what do you guys think about moving instances" and they'd have seen immediately how unpopular it was, and could have just said "alright fair enough then we stay".
Is it just me, or is there seemingly always some massively petty drama happening somewhere in the fediverse that people just can't help but whinge about? I swear it's like 50% of the All feed sometimes 😂
Open things come with open drama. It's honestly fun to me, it's my own very niche drama show
If there's more than one person, there's drama brewing. I never check the All feed and yet can always find something. On this occasion I did a meme, but normally, I dodge that shit like Neo.
All I've seen is "differences in opinion" but no one actually saying what they disagree over? Seems like a lot of drama over nothing from my perspective?
This is heresay from another thread on the topic, but I’ll repeat it here:
The 196 mods were from the lemmy.world instance despite 196 being hosted on blahaj.zone, resulting in delays of moderation actions. Blahaj.zone admins stepped in to pick up the slack, but the mods didn’t figured a better solution would be to just move it to lemmy.world, but apparently some instances are federated with blahaj but not world, or had other reasons to not want it to move, causing drama…
Sometimes, users make comments and posts that are tricky to moderate. In those situations, it appears the 196 mods wanted to be a bit more lenient, while the admin wanted to be a bit more strict in terms of removing that content. It's not one specific thing, it seems like more of an accumulation of small decisions that built up and caused the mod team to make a rash decision.
Locking the existing version of a community and forcing people to move to another instance without any prior consultation is indeed quite rash
Ada does not accept sealioning and "Just asking questions"-types in the very trans-friendly space on blahaj.zone, which doesn't seem to be an issue for the mod team (showing how much they are out of touch - moving 196 to .world is a bad move, because such user conduct is more acceptable on .world). Also, it seems that the decision wasn't "rash" - A commenter in the "what went wrong"-post remembered that a mod off-handedly wrote that they were thinking about moving to .world about a month ago (and got pushback even back then). Also, trying that move without even consulting your community once is either pretty bold or pretty stupid, depending on viewpoint.
The mods latest statement helps explain somewhat: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20976989
I think the reasoning for this is that ultimately it's not relevant - the mods don't want to point fingers at the admin claiming bad behavior, they just don't want their community moderated in a certain way and let the admin continue doing what they're doing elsewhere. From that point of view, bringing up specific disagreements would only stir up unnecessary drama to a topic that's basically already resolved, detracting from the real issue at hand of how to move forward.
What is this 196 and why do they keep popping up on my feed
real
