I have cats, and I never would have responded to somebody the way rookie did in that thread. Also sounds like it’s less “heat of the moment” When people are coming forward with other stories where he’s been very emotionally charged during conversations.

But, all that aside, why is a backend programmer for lemmy an admin/mod at all?

As soon as someone in a position of power shows their willingness to use that power to further their own agenda in any way, rather than for the benefit of the community, they should immediately and unequivocally have that power withdrawn.

Rooki has showed us all who he is, and what he is willing to do with power. He has not felt any consequences. In future, he’ll just be more cautious with how he abuses his power.

Using the Hippocratic oath as a guide is stupid. It only applies to medical personnel that take the oath, and medical personnel haven’t taken that oath since at least the 60s because it actually has a lot of unethical shit incompatible with modern morality. For example, the original Hippocratic oath is against abortion. Does that mean that Lemmy is anti-abortion now? It also forbids surgery for kidney stones, are the admins certified to make this kind of medical decisions.

Just write or choose a good ethical framework that is actually relevant for the management of online communities. There’s better, more modern shit out there that also includes the principle of do no harm. Lemmy.World is handled by amateurs.

It’s good to have these issues. I still look at Lemmy as v1 of something that will eventually be quite different and the moderation and admin questions are not easily solved.

It seems like there are some good ideas in the comments, but another might be community voting for mods. Its interesting to me how undemocratic these democratic platforms are. Might be something to consider in future versions of Lemmy.

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…

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.

What’s crazy is all the admins had to do was look at that subs modlog prior to the controversy to see this was all most likely a troll:

https://lemmy.world/modlog/1309?page=3&actionType=ModRemoveComment

That mod team doesn’t give two shits about “free speech”.

Let them migrate to their own instance, changing all of lemmy.world’s rules and making all those sticky threads is about as much as you could feed a troll.

And yet do I see correctly, that nothing at all was done about the mods that removed posts stating with proof, that the AKC agrees that cats are oblate carnivores and should not eat vegan cat food.

This whole thing reads like an apology to those who were wrong to begin with.

The integrity in this post is off the charts.

Love to see it.

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.

we investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing

good response. love knowing there are adults in the room turning pissing contests in to practical policy.

To be clear, while the idea that discussion is welcome 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.

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.

So… just to check my understanding, what you’re saying is that whether or not cats can survive on a vegan diet, it doesn’t matter? Right? You’re saying that you decided the admins overstepped and you regret approaching ambiguity the way you did? I suppose that seems reasonable. There’s plenty of misinfo all over Lemmy as is, and as such there’s gotta be various ways we can handle it - from top-down bans to trusting the readers.

As for the diet stuff, what, are they using lab-grown meat? Is that the TLDR here?