As it stands right now, individual mods have way too much power to fuck up the platform by banning people for political reasons and the modlog is not even remotely adequate in providing a full story on such actions. This isn’t too big of an issue now, but as certain instances have proven, it has the potential to become a federation-wide problem if it’s allowed to continue.
On reddit, the platform Lemmy was made to replace, removals are logged (r/undelete) so that any interested party may look into them, the users are warned of the action so that they know not to behave as such, and the affected parties can (in practice, most mods will just instantly mute you) have a chance to appeal. Here, your posting history is instantly wiped out with no chance of seeing the light of day, you’re given a nebulous reason in the mod log, if any, and you have zero tools for correcting an erroneous action. You’re just wiped out instantly with most of the people you’ve interacted with not even having knowledge that you’re gone.
There’s also an issue where removing a comment which is rightfully due for removal (for example: dogwhistled bigotry) also removes any comments below it explaining why the original comment is bad. This leads to a situation where mods are either forced to either keep up the hateful rhetoric alongside its callout, or remove the comment while also wiping out the educating material. This is an example where I feel redacting could be an acceptable option to keep the community safe while also allowing bigots to face the music for their shitty views.
The tools Lemmy provides to deal with evil on the platform are opaque and inadequate, and have high potential for being used in bad faith by bad actors seeking to destroy the platform itself, and have even caused friction among users in good faith in the past (as many warring instances, federating and defederating have shown) Ultimately a healthy federation comes from having moderation tools which protect the average person from being exposed to evil, while also giving a complete picture to those want to look into the why and how of a removal.
And for the love of god, if an instance bans you, please don’t require you dig your own grave by having to block each and every community from that instance manually, one by one.
Thanks for bringing this up.
I do not see this type of post too often, which should be important when trying to be better than other social media.
Some sites hide comment or post behind a warning, sucks but better than deleting.
Yes, modlog is really bare bones.
Awesome to see this discussion continue, while also seeing many different views on this topic!
The reason you don’t see many posts like this is because it’s just starting to become a problem now, I’ve been watching the mod log and 99.9999% of removals have been good faith and something everyone can agree on. I’ve also seen some people get dinged for antisemitism for calling out Israeli Apartheid, and a few cases of an instance/community flat out removing content because one of the mods/admins has a problem with the user. They’re rare now but that isn’t always going to be the case, especially as the platform grows and especially as trolls start to target the platform. Increased transparency and accountability will give the community an opportunity to keep abusive mods/instances in check. Ultimately, instances have the right to moderate on ideology, but people deserve to know what’s going on so they can avoid instances that go against their principals.
