this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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356 users here now
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.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- 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
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
I've said it before but this is a good time to say it again: Lemmy can be more authoritarian than even Reddit.
Yes there is a modlog, but no notifications, no modmail, no ability to even know who did the moderation other than that it was done by a "mod" - Reddit at least told us that we were banned?!?! and allowed for an appeal process - all of which makes total sense when you consider the authoritarian nature of the devs, who are well-known for site-wide banning upon saying something that they disagree with (even simple facts).
I am much happier on PieFed, which offers numerous options for democratization of moderation - e.g. you can place icons next to users names, or have that done automatically based on rules, thereby increasing the set of options from the binary "remove post or ban" vs. "do nothing, leave it alone for everyone to see" to allow you to decide what to do based on those. Like there are keyword filters in place (beyond simply "All" vs. "None", also offering "Some", if you wanted e.g. some Trump or Musk content but less than the currently tsunami of it!), thereby allowing a mod to leave a post up and allow the community members to individually tailor the content to suit their tastes. Like for a <2 week account, I may respond differently; or for someone who receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes, I may choose not to respond at all rather than waste time on such sea-lioning tactics.
Lemmy was made by the people who got banned from Reddit for being too toxic. We are using their tools, made for and by authoritarians, unless we build and use better (like Mbin and now PieFed).
This specific thing - about notifications - may change (though it has not in the 2 years I moved here from Reddit... only getting worse in fact, as the modlog used to say the name of the mod but now it simply says "mod"), but the overall trend looks like it will not.
I think it's leaning that way. And I think it's hampering it's growth. I still like Lemmy way more than Reddit though!
And piefed is awesome!
Like what?
Any tool can be used in many ways, but overall the trend that I see in PieFed is to place more power into the hands of the individual users rather than force administrators or community moderators or developers to have to do every little thing. Even right down to the choice of implementation language being Python rather than Rust, which shifts the balance downwards allowing more people to control their own instances rather than have to rely upon the developers, and facilitates user contributions to the codebase.
Of course instance admins should control their own instances - it's their hardware after all, bought and paid for, and with their effort more than simply money - and similarly moderators their communities. I am just speaking to the overall trends (the overall balance being shifted more towards users on PieFed, compared to Lemmy and Reddit) that I have seen, but am open to feedback if others see differently? I should note that PieFed is relatively much newer than Lemmy, despite how features keep being added weekly, so e.g. if PieFed lacks a feature such as notifications for being banned, I would likely chalk it up to it simply being so new, rather than a deliberate choice not to bother with such, which the administrative practices observed on lemmy.ml lends me to believe is the case for Lemmy.
Wow, thanks for the details. I never dove into it that deep. Great write-up!
First, thank you so much for sharing your experiences!
Are you sure about your first point though? Seriously, I shitpost like ALL THE TIME, and I have never once seen that happen. Here's one example where I did such recently, ironically to one of your posts. It has zero downvotes that I can see, even viewed from lemmy.world where the community is housed.
But assuming that the above is one of the "experimental features", and combining it with the second issue, I would say that so long as the -1 was INTERNAL to that instance and not shared with others, then so what? If an instance admin desires to make a place "for serious discussions only", then reaction gifs (aka light-hearted funzies!:-P) would be "undesirable" in that case? Most instance owners could leave the setting turned OFF, and hopefully those that turn it ON will be very up-front about what they are doing (and in a manner far better than lemmy.ml's "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers", saying nothing whatsoever about the fact that you will receive a site-wide ban, from communities that you've never even so much as heard of, if you ever criticize Russia, China, or North Korea), though if not, I'm sure that people will find out quickly:-).
It sounds like a tool, which like any tool is up to the wielder to use appropriately. Perhaps that one would be likely to be misused though? If so, then I hope it does not make it into the final codebase. That is one fantastic feature about PieFed though: unlike Rust and the limited contributions to Lemmy keeping it mostly static for the past 2 years that I've been here, PieFed is extremely dynamic and adds new features weekly (pretty much literally), so if some features are good and others bad, that just all the more is awesome that we can "explore" that space a bit, to find and sift the features that are worth keeping from those that are not? It would be important then to distinguish between more "experimental" vs. "stable" instances - though Lemmy is the same (look at Beehaw, Hexbear, heck even Lemmy.World runs a modified codebase somewhat distinct from base Lemmy), so the only real difference here seems to me that PieFed provides more tools than Lemmy does, and moreover can get through their shitty initial development phase more quickly to the phase where it can be fine-tuned by more people (since more people know Python).
Seriously, if someone wants to call some of my comments as "low-effort"... that's on them? And may even be appropriate, if what they are truly looking for is long paragraphs of pure text? (I can do that too... :-P)
As I understand your third issue "Vote weighing", that is a tool to help reduce the burden on moderators. The second most active instance lemm.ee shutting down due to lack of people willing to put the time & effort required to clean up the contentious back-and-forth discussions between people is a perfect illustration of why some auto-mod tools may be helpful. First, mods would choose to enact this in their communities or not, and second, wouldn't individual contributions to a specific community be a desirable trait to look into, e.g. whether someone's post may need to be quarantined and approved by a mod rather than simply allowed to go through, and then have to be removed (and the user banned), if e.g. a day-1 account decides to post trash, or rather a year-old account but who posts for the very first time in your community? Edit: to explain a bit further, right now Lemmy has just 2 classes of users: those with authority (admins and mods), and those without, whereas PieFed is expanding this to add a new class of "known posters" with community-specific karma having been built up, similar to how mods currently see the username and say "yeah, I know THAT person, they're kinda cool!", and then just kinda trust that they are doing now as they have reliably always done in the past (importantly: the community having liked it, hence the community-specific karma being positive), by posting cool stuff rather than insidious stuff that may need moderator attention to remove it. Although if they somehow DID, then mods still retain the ability to remove something when necessary. This just codifies what the standard practice has always been? And it only affects the few minutes to hours between the user posting vs. the moderator seeing that fact and deciding what to do about it, though importantly it vastly reduces the NEED for moderator actions, by being more selective about when a moderator is necessary to be called upon.
And it is not like it is unheard of happening on Lemmy either - e.g. seahorse the owner of midwest.social banning people outright for downvoting their posts, and lemmy.ml site-wide banning people for e.g. criticizing Russia, China, or North Korea. Such things are bound to happen everywhere. This at least is a tool that offers transparency and formalizing an arrangement rather than leaving it be a surprise to people when it happens to them organically (and as your OP got into, not even being told about it!).
Honestly I do not know how well this all will work out... but it is exciting that such experiments are being done! I did not like PieFed's implementation or even desire to allow for truly anonymous voting, and sure enough time told the story on that one and it was discontinued. The features that prove useful can be kept, while the features that end up being less so can be discarded. Lemmy barely changes over the years, so the model of PieFed being much more adept and agile to jump ahead and explore new territory... this I consider a good thing, in general terms.
And one thing I absolutely adore: even if Lemmy were somehow perfect, PieFed represents a third (after K/Mbin) ActivityPub implementation of the Threadiverse (well there's also nodeBB and flarum but nobody talks about them, and ofc Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. but those really do different things). It is supremely important to not have all the eggs be placed into a singular basket, and whether we make use of them or not, it is great to have such choices. Especially when someone can spin up an instance and, knowing the language (Python in this case), modify the code to suit their individual needs:-).
You shitpost, sure, but you also post massive, informative, high quality walls of text.
Which is why I like general-purpose instances that encourage having both!:-)
Okay I guess there's a lot still that I do not understand.
What is a "reaction gif" then? Mine apparently did not qualify? Is it only gifs from certain sources, like tenor or giffy or some such, and with no explanatory text added? Even so, the URL for mine is https://media.tenor.com/IBdbO5idxJcAAAAM/garak-garak-ds9.gif so seems to qualify on all counts, unless somehow including "alternate text" (for blind users or if the image does not resolve) prevents it from being toggled? My example seems to suggest that perhaps what you mentioned is an experimental feature, which is not turned on for regular servers e.g. piefed.social... maybe?
And by "reputation" then do you mean "attitude"? That is even less useful than reputation, as I have never once seen anything based upon it. I could imagine an icon being put next to someone's name, but that would require ENORMOUS bias towards something, like theoretically if someone only did 10x "reaction gifs" for every comment that included even so much as a single actual word (in English or otherwise)... which again, so what? For an instance that decided that they wanted "serious posts only", which piefed.social seems not to, that could be a "feature"?
The crucial parts of that last bit are: (1) that it is INTERNAL to the instance, not like a down-vote sent back to the OP's home institution would be - if the latter happened then I 100% agree with you there that such a feature is BAD BAD BAD; and (2) that the feature is something that can be toggled off or on, as the instance owner chooses. In that case, it is not something that "PieFed" does, but something that "[piefed instance name here]" chooses to enable, which PieFed (the software) allows but does not mandate. So a bit more complex than full yay or nay here, yet still if 99% of instances turn this off (as I would expect, for something like this that seems designed purely for "serious discussions only" - after all why else would someone do this?!?), then it's not like "all" or even "most" of PieFed is this way, but rather only some? i.e. it's a feature that PieFed instances are OFFERED, not like a foundational feature of what PieFed IS. It seems to me anyway, but a lot of this is based on premises that again I do not fully understand (most especially, whether it is even happening at all or not, or if it is merely something experimental under consideration) so I hope I do not come across as coming against you or anything here. :-)
Instance admins are not mods, and mods are not normal users. I think this is fine. Or at least... those same identical arguments were once levied against the usage of Lemmy altogether, when we were back on Reddit. "They don't know what they're doing", "The instances will fail and people will lose ownership rights to all content that they have ever created - yes they can migrate but then what if they wanted to delete something later, they could not because the original user account is gone and there is no way to prove subsequent ownership rights?", "Most people will not leave Reddit, it's too big, the niche content simply will not be there", "The number of trolls and toxic users - kicked off of Reddit because they were TOO TOXIC EVEN FOR REDDIT - is just too damn high!" It was all true then, and what you are saying about PieFed may be all true now... but so what? It's all a grand experiment anyway! :-) We move forward, and we improve things. Your arguing against these features will help kill them, or perhaps cause them to be modified like making them significantly harder to turn on, or with warnings on that it should only be used in special cases, and so on.
People abuse Lemmy all the damn time. As this very community attests to:-).
Suppressing communities at an admin's whim is already possible? Farid and I went down a very interesting rabbit hole over on StarTrek.Website where ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net was specifically disabled (plus another one too that I now forget, perhaps on lemmygrad.ml) - you could see other Hexbear.net communities, but not that specific one. Though there was no mention of this anywhere that I could find: no announcement post, it did not appear in the Instances list as blocked, again you could view other communities, and again I forget the details but you might even have been able (at some point, but then not later?) to view past posts there. So while your concern is valid, this is in no way shape or form limited to PieFed: this has been happening for at least a year on Lemmy already, given how desperately desired the "instance block" feature was, especially compared to how lame it was when it finally came out (e.g. it still allows users from that instance to send you DMs, triggering notifications, etc.). And there are counter-examples where this tool can be used in the RIGHT way too?
I will think more about what you said about Digg. Although my naive first thoughts are... that is already the way of the world? I do not want "echo chambers" either, so I suppose it depends on the implementation: does every single post from certain users get up-weighted? That would be bad. Or does a user simply become "trusted" after like 10 comments with 5+ upvotes, after which the signal to a moderator that someone has made a new posts gets labelled as being much less urgent, since it was submitted by a "trusted user"? That type of class I have no problems with: you are a stranger, then a probationary time period that usually won't last long, then a full citizen, no further subdivisions required (although some still exist: mods for one, admins for another, creators of communities regardless of current mod status still another, etc.). So VERY LIMITED vote weighting, for extremely LIMITED purposes I am okay with. Is that all that is going on, or is there more? The devil is in the details I suppose.
Fwiw I agree with you that votes should not matter which instance it is from. Now, I am a huge fan of blocking trolling instances - the tankie triad for one, maybe some others like your OP here as well, especially if the blocking is done at the individual user level so that my decision to do so affects nobody else - but once someone is in, a "full citizen" as it were, then they should count the same, I agree. Maybe make a post about this in one of the c/Fediverse communities? I also spoke out against the anonymous vote thing. I am glad to see that one die. Polls are one thing, but to spam other instances with obfuscated data, just... why? Let things either be done in the light or else the darkness, but if someone chooses the latter then they have no right to complain when they get blocked - for the simple reason that my rights end where someone else's begin.
Oh wow I thought you were joking about "piefed.world", simply misspelling "piefed.social" and conflating it with "lemmy.world" that you are so used to. That is... fascinating!
I view PieFed as merely software. Lemmy is likewise software, but more of a "black box" for most people it would seem, who can't simply open it up and modify it to suit their needs, whereas instance admins could do that more readily for PieFed, either for good or for ill. Both Lemmy and PieFed have their advantages and disadvantages. At least the devs of PieFed seem eager to listen... mostly, and especially if someone is offering actual code contributions, but even when not. The Lemmy devs on the other hand... have made the software what it is, and it will not be made differently no matter how much people ask. I've seen code requests languish for FIVE YEARS, at which point they are either severely overloaded trying to work with the language, or it represents a choice not to do it, or most likely both. In contrast, PieFed is starting off behind Lemmy, but it is catching up - having already surpassed it in most ways (not searching, that one Lemmy still wins hands-down), and I have already watched it blossom greatly over the last half a year from being barely functional alpha to fully-functioning beta. It will get better, especially with help from people offering their thoughts about how to make it better:-).
Motherfuck, you write more than I do. I fucking love it. Don't stop! You are def adding content to this discussion and it's given me a lot to think about!
Which they promptly reject every single time, because it's not a human doing it.