this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Posting Guidelines
All posts should follow this basic structure:
- Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
- What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
- Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
- Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
- Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
- Don’t use private communications to prove your point. We can’t verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don’t deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don’t harass mods or brigade comms. Don’t word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin’ in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
- If you are the accused PTB, while you are welcome to respond, please do so within the relevant post.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
YTPB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
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That was me. I'm tired of FUTO fans derailing discussions about FLOSS with advocacy for their obviously-not-open-source software and insisting that it is open source.
Every time Futo comes up, someone will insist it is open source, others will correct them, and soon more than 50% of a thread that is supposed to be about open source is people arguing about them.
I'm pretty sure that Futo's (now recanted) position that they were open source (despite the term having a clear definition which is very internationally recognized and which Futo's license obviously does not meet) was an intentional marketing gimmick - "there is no such thing as bad publicity" and every time a bunch of people are arguing about them there is a chance they'll get more customers (some of whom might even believe it is open source).
Probably more than that even; more than I want to count. The modlog is public.
The What's the best open source keyboard for android? post where you commented has not been locked, but most of the futo-related comments in it are deleted. Note that while your comment was not advocating for futo per se, it was (successfully) encouraging others to continue the offtopic discussion. You could have answered your question by reading the modlog.
I did lock another post in the same community (the topic of which is, again, Open Source), which was What are your thoughts on FUTO? (and I left a comment there explaining why).
I generally try to assume good faith but I'm pretty sure some Futo proponents are actually just trolling at this point.
I hope this answers your questions.
I think this would make sense in a Lemmy community that was OpenSourceInitiative who has a very specific set definition. But open source as a general idea is fairly open to interpretation. Some people think source-available is open source. I disagree, but that's just my personal opinion. Now if something was closed source, that's a very clear distinction.
I've seen communities die out over mods enforcing their personal definitions. The Linux subreddit and Lemmy Linux community had issues with this a few years ago where the mod was deleting comments of people talking about what fell outside of their idea that Linux discussion should be FLOSS-only (people discussing closed source apps that ran on Linux, etc).
I think deleting does more harm than good. It's better for people to discuss when things are a problem so they can understand them better. The Free Software Foundation is way more strict as to their licensing ideas, but even they still discuss and have a page full of alternative licenses where they discuss some are better than others (and even a bad open source license is better than a non-open source license). They don't ban the mention of conflicting ideas.
Deleting just leaves people confused (and in my case I would have appreciated knowing the issue instead of just seeing a thread full of deleted comments and remaining ignorant). And it does a greater harm because people casually searching on search engines or whatever won't find any sort of discussion or push back.
Open source has a definition that has been agreed for nearly two decades, some billionaire doesn't get to redefine it because of his personal feelings.
The FSF has a list of licenses, but they specifically label the non-free ones and state they shouldn't be called free software.
You say open source, but you link to the Open Source Initiative. The OSI has their own standards and ideas of what open source is, they call their standard the Open Source Definition. And as I said, such discussion restrictions would make sense on an OSI/OSD community, but that is not an OSI/OSD community. And it is not THE definition of open source, which is a vague undefined term which simply refers to source that is available and possibly modifiable. This is how dictionaries, wikipedia, etc define it. It's very broad. There are a million "open source" licenses that don't fall within the OSI guidelines, which means there are many many different ideas of what open source means. It's the whole point of contention in the Free Software / Open Source debate that has been going on for decades.
That's why I made the example. Because they have defined their idea of the terms Free Software and Non-Free. But they don't not call it open source. You can even see it in this post:
Even they don't refuse to call it open source. They simply say the restrictions of the "open source license" don't meet their personal criteria for Free Software (which they define). Just like how OSI can say some open source license doesn't meet their criteria for their Open Source Definition. They simply list licenses that "comply with the Open Source Definition", so even they acknowledge not all "open source" licenses meet their criteria. (which, by the way, has to go through their review process to comply with and be listed under the Open Source Definition... so you could write a license that meets all their criteria, but it not be considered complying with the OSD because it didn't go through their review process - does that mean it's not open source?)
The OSD is different from open source. As I said, these restrictions would make sense in an OSI or OSD community, but it's an open source community. The sidebar says "Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology". If they want a more restrictive discussion they should use an OSD/OSI community, or strictly limit the rules to the OSD definition (which is silly).
When an admin/mod says:
And then just goes around deleting whatever posts they want (which don't violate any of the rules) on a hunch, that's just conspiracy and paranoia. And an abuse of power.
Personally, I'm far on the FSF side of software ideology. But even I'd be happy for people to use a slightly restrictive open source program if the other option is a proprietary, closed source, Google cloud reporting program. I'd be happy if people used source-available "open source" over that. I'd be happier the more copyleft it got. But I wouldn't run around deleting every comment that doesn't meet my FSF preference of open source. People have different needs and ideas. If one keyboard has the features people need and is more free, private, but has some restrictions on its open source license, and you remove that option/discussion, they will just stick with Google keyboard. It's harmful. It could be their gateway to something better, an eventual change in philosophy. But by removing the option and discussion, you lessen those chances. You shrink the community, discussion, and the movement toward more freedom.
Although the FSF doesn't like licenses that force release of code of private versions, it should be noted that Open Watcom also has a termination clause. You can no longer use that software if you are being sued by watcom or something like that.
This termination clause is why entities who otherwise would be okay with this license, like Debian, don't find it acceptable.