Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)

The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.

Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.

However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their "drama communities" as well.

Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them

After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)

In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.

There's also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts "as a bit" using wording that they were not aware is misgendering ("fella") which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the "bit doing" during this heated period.

This "struggle session" is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.

EDIT: Even lemmygrad is wondering what the hell is going on

The removed comment

Moderator of ye powertripping bastards allows Lemmy.World moderators to lie and slander all over the place but does not appreciate those Moderators being called out on their lies.

After removing this post calling out Lemmy.World for banning users criticizing Kamala Harris, DB0 moderator also banned me from their instance.

And this is the Hexbear reply thread. Please be very wary of the extremism and bigotry and know that they are largely defederated

I think they've been watching too much porn.

I'm not going to name names here, because there's multiple places doing this and also I forgot what instance I saw it on, but I've noticed something disturbing with the automated repost bots. You know, those bots that copy whole Reddit communities over to Lemmy with tons of automated posts? I don't like them in general because when I reply to a post I like the OP to actually see my reply, but this issue is more ethical. It's the automated duplication of porn from Reddit to Lemmy.

Now, I know that these models have consented to their images being shared on the internet. However, in my own personal opinion, porn models should have some amount of control over the manner in which their image is shared on a public forum. In this case, the people posting their naked bodies do not have control over how the image is shared. They can't decide to delete it if they revoke consent later, and they can't report creepy comments on their pictures. In most cases, they probably don't even know what Lemmy is, and yet their images are getting search indexed and shared with people. There's no creative control over the distribution by the person whose body is in the picture. I consider that a form of non-consensual intimate media. I don't think these bots should be allowed to repost porn without asking the permission of the user who originally shared the media.

It's also funny that rather than removing all of my comments, they just decided to remove those I referenced and one particular reply, meaning whoever they were they cared more about the narrative and making the conversation unintelligible so that in the framing that was left people could just fill in the gaps just based on the downvotes and the accusations.

Like I said to some people and now extend to the mod,

I love how people like you are the flip side equal of Trump people warping reality to shit on it. Same bullshit, both sides aren't equal but people like you certainly resemble them closer.

ITT, people who couldn't comprehend cult psychology (and given the inherent Stanford prison experiment abuse within it, any psychology) or even the inevitable conclusion of what they are claiming and accuse me for being ignorant of what I'm literally alluding to in the first comment.

Even supposing that there was some legitimacy to the removals, it's telling how selective it was and where it wasn't. And literally labeling nuance "trolling" in a circlejerk meme reddit ... probably makes sense. But still, imagine being so fragile the huge number of downvotes could not do it for you.

Some of you really want to divide society as much as MAGA does. My message didn't neatly fit into the circlejerk meme, so I guess I must be "trolling, or worse" - amazing.

I can also confirm, can't delete or edit the comments to provide context, but people can still vote on comments that have been removed. Huh, didn't think I'd find something like this reddit was so clearly better at. So now I guess I know why they decided to selectively remove comments and framed the thread into what has been left.

Will it be effective?

EDIT: The banning event continues. Please consult the modlog to observe.

https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&modId=7121342

If you scroll down to about a day ago, you might be able to observe an emerging behavior from this mod.

EDIT 2: The mod in question moderates a total of 108 Lemmy communities. How deep does this conspiracy run? Is this mod a lost Redditor? More to come!

EDIT 3: The mod has now removed my comment all together, one might assume because it was still receiving upvotes in the 2 hours following my ban. Are there similarities here to Watergate? You be the judge!

EDIT 4: The mod in question has now been removed as a mod of the !vegan@lemmy.world community, as a result of their abuse of power.

https://lemmy.world/post/19731457

This was their response:

EDIT 5: This will be my final update, since as far as I see it, the issue this thread focuses on has been resolved. To quote Beaver herself in a very ironic comment she made directed towards someone else:

Clearly this was all just a case of...

That moment when, if I ever get banned from the ML instance, one might as well tell me to treat it as an extension of the act of fleeing while entrusting Archive Today and the victim to relay this message (totally becoming of the spokespeople for the people's liberation, /s also I would not voluntarily remove a thread of mine, so if this is gone by the time you get the archive...).

I consider myself a typical Orwellian person within the ML instance (fun fact, stands for Marxist-Leninist) who believes in the validity of debate, diplomacy, and standing up for oneself, having signed up for ML because the others were overcrowded when I was led to see Reddit as bad news due to the API (yet here I am). If I don't want to engage with someone, I leave, and if someone disobeys the rules of something I'm the admin of (not any instance), I ban them with tools already at my disposal (as opposed to actual attacks using tools not anyone's business, and that was after banning her). Sadly this isn't everyone. Worth mentioning on behalf of someone afraid of breaking rules against block evasion/retaliation, being the Orwellian I am who won't stand for things like the creed-based/LGBT discrimination I see. I see this (unauthorized username revelation and a false excuse of finding a rabbit hole) and I think "what's next, will admins threaten to reveal our passwords as the norm in due time". The US is on the verge of banning Tiktok for such shit, and here we are thinking of ourselves as invincible, like some cult.

When someone then mentions it on Reddit with her permission (and yes I have permission too), he shows up, claims she has the same name on 20 sites (when the dox that anyone can read clearly shows otherwise, and I did doublecheck his new claims, they're false again), and tries to demoralize the thread. I'm ashamed personal attacks and stealing info/photos is the norm for my brethren. And I'd bet a pretty big wager to prove me wrong, just to see if people would think they can.

This is out of hand, can we either overhaul admins or defederate ML considering all the threats of banishments make it dead weight? Because I feel like a sanction is in order.

17 days ago, @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world banned @Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net from !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world for 2 weeks. The cited reason was Admitting to being a troll: "I'm an agent of chaos." lemmyshitpost does not have a rule against trolling, so even if this claim is true, there are still no grounds for a ban.

https://lemmy.ca/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&modId=729060&userId=391830

While we no longer have access to the thread in which this quote was allegedly said, the modlog would seem to indicate that it was related to this post, which shows a man complaining that he's never been privy to private conversations between girls and their fathers, and a dad mocking him in reply. The body furthermore elaborates in meme form that people are being misogynist in the comments.

Misogynists and other varieties of bigots often complain that the inclusion of women and minorities is political and divisive, and thus that we should not discuss feminism in polite company. Track_Shovel's meme is feminist, and FlyingSquid's problem with Track_Shovel appears to contain the same essence - that Track_Shovel's feminist posting is apparently intended to create conflict; the definition of trolling.

FlyingSquid's association between being an agent of chaos, and posting with intent to create offense, is an unfounded leap in logic. Chaos is actually an important religious concept, so influential that it forms one of the pillars of the morality system in Dungeons and Dragons, alongside Law, Good, and Evil. Back in the real world, various religions have painted chaos as either bad or good, depending on the values of the religion. Many religions describe chaos as a primordial force predating the gods' creation of the world. The Greeks venerated, or at least respected, the chaos goddess Eris. Discordianism, a cult originating in the 1960s, worships both Eris and the concept of chaos.

FlyingSquid has a history of mod abuse when the topic of religion is raised. In this post, FlyingSquid violates the rules of a community they themselves mod, concerning hate speech against religions. This ban fits into that pattern. Track_Shovel has the religious right to worship and to act on behalf of chaos, however they see it, as long as they do not harm anyone else. Their post to lemmyshitpost was not harmful, and was offensive only to misogynists. Supporting women's freedoms and safety is consistent with the values of Discordianism and other chaos-worshipping religions, and is not trolling. FlyingSquid's analysis of the situation as being intended to get a reaction out of misogynists, rather than as intended to affirm the safety of women, dismisses women's safety and silences feminist speech.

U/kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@programming.dev banned from dubvee.org for the reason

Ridiculous username makes me think I'm having a stroke

What a silly place.

I'm trying to work out why there are posts in here about users being banned from communities, when neither the user or the community are under their control. Is this being mirrored from somewhere, or is this something that's limited to what people on their instance see?

They are also, apparently, banning users that have never been to their instance.

I've told this story on Lemmy a couple of times since being banned from Blahaj Zone, and I'll tell it again.

I once posted a meme to a Blahaj community I moderated in which someone named Obvious_Troll@hexbear.net was attacking a trans person. ~~It was a political meme, and I'll try to avoid saying what the political viewpoint was so that this thread doesn't get derailed~~. But as part of the meme, Obvious_Troll was being transphobic, and the reader was expected to agree that transphobia is bad and Obvious_Troll is... an obvious troll. The username wasn't actually important to the meme, I was just including a picture of a Lemmy comment and had to include a name, so I made one up.

Ada then messaged me to say that the post would be removed unless I redacted Obvious_Troll's name. Ada said that Obvious_Troll is a real, trans lemmy user, and I'm not to attack them. There is nobody on hexbear named Obvious_Troll, I made that username up.

Read bottom to top:

So Ada defended a fictional transphobic troll, deciding they were trans for some reason. The troll's username was not the point of the meme, the point was what they were saying. So I made up a nonsense username to support the point of the meme. I don't think anyone would choose the username Obvious_Troll unless they wanted to be seen as a troll. As near as I can tell, Ada defended Obvious_Troll because they were from Hexbear, and Ada seems to think every Hexbear user is trans. Even a made-up one who wants to be seen as a troll and who harasses trans people. Why did Ada hyperfocus on the instance name, and not notice that the username was ridiculous? I don't know. I don't understand it.

Blahaj is intended to be a safe space for trans people. And Ada's intention with asking for redaction of this fake made up name was, somehow, to protect a trans person. And that's good. But it's really weird that Ada thought the way to protect trans people, is by defending fictional transphobic trolls.

EDIT: So, the discussion got derailed not by politics as I expected, but by Ada claiming Obvious_Troll is a real person again. Here's the original post in which Obvious_Troll is being transphobic and the reader is supposed to agree that transphobia is bad:

Context:

• https://lemmy.world/post/19264848
• !lemmyworld@lemmy.world

This was originally written as a reply for this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/19238577

I'm copying it here because I don't trust a LW admin to just not delete it right away since that seems to be something they love doing.

tl;dr - a user calls out the LW mods for rapid fire banning a bunch of users today, I investigate

=====

Let's review some of these bans, as called out by ChomskyWasRight@slrpunk.net:

https://lemm.ee/post/40926293/14446156

https://imgur.com/YSoJbgs

From the top:

=====

LagrangePoint@lemmy.world https://imgur.com/4XsXuOC

Quote: "LW admin/mod team seem to have this overbearing and weird belief that they need to tell everyone else what to think and how to think it. How about... you all just fuck off and don't?

Result: Permaban

=====

aniki@lemmings.world https://imgur.com/LIye27F

Quote: "All rights are won through violence, child. Bans on here means less than the nothing platitudes you utter"

Result: 15 day ban

=====

catloaf@lemm.ee https://imgur.com/ONGdgNo

Quote: [the quote is really long, pls dont make me type it and just look at the link lol]

Result: 15 day ban

Note: the comment precedes the ban by 26 days, but catloaf's recent comment history contains opinions critical of the LW News mod team

=====

DoctorButts@kbin.melroy.org https://imgur.com/q2kktNQ

Quote: "Damn what a shame, guy almost stopped being a moderator on an internet forum, would have been a grave tragedy"

Result: Permaban

=====

stormesp@lemm.ee https://imgur.com/ZCRtuJe

Stormesp's profile at lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/u/stormesp

Quote: [there were no comments removed in the modlog, but stormesp's recent comment history contains opinions critical of the LW News mod team, read them yourself]

Result: 15 day ban

=====

MindTraveller@lemmy.ca https://imgur.com/YwIMSOq

Quotes: [multiple quotes, there are a lot, check out the link]

Result: 15 day ban

=====

Summary

Most interestingly here is that the two users who got permabanned didn't use slurs and didn't call for violence, they merely insulted the moderator team. I guess in the LW News mod team's eyes, that's a horrible, terrible, awful, unforgivable offense, so.......... PERMABAN.

Aniki literally is saying "words are useless, let's resort to violence" but that's a 15 day ban only, OK, makes sense, right????????

Catloaf and Stormesp were actively leaving comments sparring with the moderator team in that thread. To be honest, none of what I'm seeing in these comment seems worthy of a ban. Unless of course, you're a LW mod and you go "this guy is disagreeing with me, therefore they deserve a ban."

Edit: I forgot to write about MindTraveller since that ~~guy~~ douchecanoe was a last minute addition. But look at those aggressive comments, ~~guy~~ douchecanoe deserves a ban for sure.

Edit 2: fixed pronouns for MindTraveller

=====

Conclusion

Not a good look. Does LW want to grow into a good Reddit alternative or do they just want to turn it into Reddit for themselves only?

LW can at least come clean about this and say "yes, the rest of you can get fucked" or maybe they will have a moment of realization at some point "oh my god, are we the baddies?"

"We've changed, I promise. It'll be different his time!"

The top few comments from hexbear’s refederation with lemmy.ca post:

that site has like 20 daily users, i dont think we’ll even notice they’re federated unless a hapless lib accidently steps in it.

It’d be nice to radicalize more people

cry havoc and let slip the bears of posting

No, these lemmy fuckers come in here and harass trans comrades.

Going onto lemmy dot cee ayy and saying DOWN WITH CIS

KKKlanada’s largest impact on American culture is a parody song by Weird Al.

I think it’s funny that by getting lemmy.ca domain this website represents all of kkkanada in the lemmyverse. knowing kkkanadians i bet that weighs heavily on the maintainers. they perhaps even wish to subdue and recuperate hexbear on behalf of liberalism.

Excuse me, but it’s KKKlanada

Death to Canada

Whining about pig poop balls was their first reason to block us

Do you guys really want to be re-federated with Hexbear?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26218551

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26218550

(posting to both communities)

A carnist lemmy world instance admin has stepped in and meatsplained to the mods while restoring comments that violated the community's rules. They deleted comments that they did not agree with, citing 'misinformation', and threatened to demod the mods if those comments were removed again. The comments were deleted and the admin was banned from the community as per violating the rules of the community, that was until they unbanned themselves (admin abuse) and unmodded two of the moderators because of "promoting harmfull actions against pets".

As far as it stands, if the lemmy world community wasn't already not a safe vegan place for you (it really wasn't) it most certainly isn't now as carnists (lemmy world instance admin) currently mod it.

I suggest any vegan who wants a safe and welcoming space to come and interact with vegantheoryclub.org. Sorry for any inconvienance that this may have caused. I am deeply upset at the admins actions today and don't condone them whatsoever.

(I will explain more about the drama surrounding Flying Squid if people don't already know about it)

This is from the same instance that randomly bans people from being too “extremist” who have never interacted with it's communities.

The community /c/soulism@lemmy.blahaj.zone was removed by the instance admins two weeks ago. The community contained only memes and discussion of the ideas of soulism. There were no attacks against anyone. Here is the admin's explanation of the situation:

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/9875313

Transcript:

ADA:
The post you linked to by MindTraveller is an active misrepresentation of events by them

Traveller and I are not “in agreement” about much of anything. Their politics are very far removed from mine

This is the text of the message I sent advising that I was shutting the group down.

After consideration, I’ve decided that non voters does not really fit the stated goals of blahaj zone. Your motives for creating it seem based on a personal vendetta, and whilst your views are genuine, nothing constructive comes from the community. All it does is create division, because its sole purpose is to target others, without really focusing on any progressive ideas or discussion of its own.

At the moment, it’s causing more harm than good to the overall community.

I’ll leave the community open, so that if you choose to set the community up on another instance, you will have the opportunity to direct them to the new location.

Given the post which you linked, (which I had not seen until now) I will be removing Traveller and the new community, because once more, the goal appears to be to create division

The goal of blahaj zone is not political. The goal is to allow trans people to have a space where they can exist on their own terms, without having to pretend to be someone they’re not. My own political views are closer to Links/LibertyHub than nonvoters or its ilk. Yet as long as there is no bigotry or gatekeeping, then trans people with politics at odds with my own are welcome. It’s why we have an “armed queers” community, despite my own strong distaste for gun culture.

It is communities/posters that exist primary to create division, without adding anything positive back, that have no place here.

This comment contains only one side of the discussion I had with Ada about Non-Voters and Soulism, here is the full context (top is newest, bottom is oldest):

Transcript:

ADA:
Hey there. After consideration, I’ve decided that non voters does not really fit the stated goals of blahaj zone. Your motives for creating it seem based on a personal vendetta, and whilst your views are genuine, nothing constructive comes from the community. All it does is create division, because its sole purpose is to target others, without really focusing on any progressive ideas or discussion of its own.

At the moment, it’s causing more harm than good to the overall community.

I’ll leave the community open, so that if you choose to set the community up on another instance, you will have the opportunity to direct them to the new location.

MINDTRAVELLER:
Thanks for letting me know. I don’t mind if nonvoters is gone. It served its purpose. The guy who was banning trans people and calling us liberals for not wanting to die is no longer in power. The Blahaj community is no longer divided. We achieved unity. And sure, some people are whining that they have to get along with others now, but the tide is against them. I’ll see if there’s a way to lock the community and prevent new posts. I want to keep the most recent post visible so in two months when the transphobes start whining about Kamala I can link that post and tell them “called it.”

MINDTRAVELLER:
There we go, all locked up. No new posts or comments.

MINDTRAVELLER:
Also, your mention of constructive politics gave me an idea. I want to create a soulist community on Blahaj. Something like https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulism101/. That place has been a ghost town since the APIcalypse, but the soulist movement has been going strong on Discord. It should have a place on Lemmy too. Plus, it would dramatically reduce the number of people mischaracterising soulism on the fediverse. The only attacks shall be against capitalism, the cisheteropatriarchy, the state, and reality.

ADA:
That sounds like a much better fit!

Non-Voters was completely locked up, and I made a post explaining the decision to close it, which both Ada and I agreed on, as you can see in this message log. In Ada's later public comment, she says the post was a misrepresentation of events. She said that she and I did not agree. However we can clearly see in this chatlog that when Ada told me the community was closing, I agreed to close it. And when I asked to open a new community not focused on any form of criticism of others users, she agreed too. If I had not agreed to do as Ada said and close the community, there would not be a post from me announcing the community's closure. So the idea that Ada and I did not agree to close the community is nonsense.

At the time that /c/soulism was removed from lemmy.blahaj.zone, I had in fact already been unbanned from /c/libertyhub by the community's mods. Ada cites division as the reason for the removal, but there was no division at this time, except between some Liberty Hub users and their own mods. Here is the log:

Transcript:

MINDTRAVELLER:
Hi, I’d like to appeal my ban on Liberty Hub. I never broke the rules, I only complained about LOC’s overly strict moderation style. I was banned with the reason “off topic”, which isn’t a rule.

KITTENZRULZ123:
I unbanned you however know that you have broken the rules, if you make me regret this act of leniency I will reban you.

At this time, the division between Non-Voters, myself, Liberty Hub, kittenzrulz, and linkopenschest had been resolved. Non-Voters had never been a community specifically designed to target Liberty Hub, and in fact linkopenschest and kittenzrulz both had posts on the community that engaged with the concept in good faith, and which I did not remove. They were never banned from the community, and they decided to reverse my ban from the community. So the three of us had been engaged in a good-faith disagreement from the start, minus one impulsive ban that was reversed, and we had already set our differences aside. I became an outright ally of Liberty Hub when they decided to relax their excessive bans, and they were exploring the possibility of treating me the same way.

Here is where I diverge from pure fact to analysis and speculation: Since division still existed between the users of Liberty Hub and the mod team, and the users perceived Ada as an ally of the mod team and of myself (because I was cooperating with everything Ada told me and getting along well with the LH mods), Ada panicked. The fact that I was getting along with everyone and making compromises was causing the conspiracy theorists to target Ada. So Ada manufactured a drama between her and myself to make it clear that she did not approve of me, even if I was agreeing to do everything she told me. The unity, compromise, and reconciliation was a bad look for Ada in the eyes of the tinfoil hat people. Ada chose to regain the tinfoil hats' favour by inventing a fake disagreement between herself and me. That's the reason /c/soulism was removed, despite hosting zero offensive content and never even having one of its posts or comments reported by anyone. Ada needed to conjure up a fight from nowhere to look good to the conspiracy people.