Ugh, the comments here are so full of BS and distortions of what really happened 🤦
So here is the actual tl;dr: Some people asked the main Fosstodon admins what they think about having an openly Trump supporting, islamo- and transphobic moderator in their team and their response was “not here on Fosstodon and not our problem” (paraphrased, but close to their actual response).
That is pretty much like this scenario: lets say you get (credibly) informed about someone openly corrupt in your organization. If your response is: I have not seen them steal money in our organization and our processes should prevent any theft happening, then you are missing the forest for the trees.
If an organization can’t get such basic governance issues right and prefers to hide behind a “neutral” stance on something that is really concerning to a large percentage of their members than they irrevocably lose a lot of trust and that is more than justified.
As a moderator myself, it’s a pretty thankless job. It’s a bit like being a politician in that no matter what you do, there are lots of people that are going to hate you.
I have to ask, then: what motivates people to do it?
If mods are not financially compensated for it, the only rational explanation is that they are either getting some form of benefit (soft power, access to privileged information) or they are getting some pleasure out of it, i.e, power tripping.
Funny how some people expose their own sad world views by projecting it onto others 😅
Some people chose to do the right things because they are right, not because they benefit from them.
Some people chose to do the right things because they are right
This is just another way of saying that people do things for moral validation - a.k.a, self-righteouness - and is no at all different from “power tripping”.
That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.
Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I’ve had my nihilistic phase in my 20’s. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the “arbitrariness” of ethics.
Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.
I’m thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.
I am not at all talking about the cases of someone who is passionate about some topic and then goes on to cultivate a community around it, and I am not saying “every moderator is doing it for some ulterior motive”.
I am talking specifically about the types that put on themselves to become mods of dozens of subreddits. Or instance admins that go months in a row begging for money to be able to pay their own bills, instead of shutting down the instance or make it only for those that contribute back.
IOW, I am talking about the cases where people act beyond what anyone would consider “healthy”.
Nah I get no dopamine from doing the right thing its neutral, some ppl just help build the place they want to see, obviously no one does anything for no reason at all?
Yeah, right 🤦 Sorry but I must conclude you have some serious intellectual stunting if you truly believe that. Ayn Rand level of delusion.
You can do things because you want to make a difference. A good difference. Not everything has to have an ulterior motive.
What “difference” is someone doing by being a mod of 50-odd subreddits, like the case of the mod in question?
I moderate a privacy community because they were looking for mods. I just delete spam from time to time
When the stakes are small, sure.
But if you were to find yourself with a community with hundreds of thousands of people, and let’s say that 0.01% percent of any group is made of people who seem like they are out to just make everyone’s life miserable, so every week we will have to deal with a couple of dozen cases of obnoxnious behavior, petty disputes, etc… how long do you think you’d be able to endure it?
Speaking for myself: I was remembering the time when I found myself as the owner and main mod of the University’s group on Orkut. When it was mostly discussions among actual students and faculty, it was all nice. Even when discussions were heated, they were not out of control. But when Orkut exploded in Brazil and it became a place for soapbox politics, spam, shouting matches between the student factions, people wanting to share articles about city events, etc, etc… it became too much for me and the handful of co-owners that joined me in the period.
I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It’s easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they’re basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.
Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.
But for others, I’m sure they just enjoy having a community. Some of them might also just not care what the naysayers say.
Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.
So many questions… :)
- What community?
- From this account, or some other? You profile page doesn’t show you as moderator for anything.
- What form of compensation are you talking about?
Don’t really want to get too deep into it but its a Facebook community and its relevant to my business and I use the community to promote my business. It’s become a large source of my business. It’s the only reason I can’t delete my Facebook profile.
Ah, I thought you were talking about something here on the Fediverse.
In any case, I wish people didn’t feel afraid to talk about business here. Maybe more people would realize that behind the majority of “business” there are genuine people and not just the cartoon capitalist pigs.
I have a Ghost blog for my business. It’ll be in the fedi as soon as they make that available for self-hosters. For now, it’s just crossposting via MastoFeed. I’ve also contacted them about posting them to Lemmy, as it seems like a much more fitting platform.
Interesting! I hope to see posts from your business soon, and it would be great to have more people like you contributing to the communities on https://indiehackers.space/
Feel like Im missing a lot of context.
AFAIK, it goes something like this:
- One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.
- Someone on Mastodon found “bad” posts from said moderator.
- The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.
- The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.
- Regardless of actions and reactions, the mob now successfully tainted the name and reputation of the instance.
- Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.
- One of fosstodon’s admins (the author of the blog post) is now saying “Screw you guys, I’m going
hometo Bluesky”
EDIT: There’s more to it. Seems like said mod is also active on Reddit (https://lemm.ee/post/60365167)
- One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.
For clarity’s sake, the views the mod expressed were:
- Calling criticism of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and transfer to Louisiana “yellow journalism” for using the phrase “disappeared”
- Defending the striking down of a school privacy policy that requires teachers get consent from LGBTQ+ kids before outing them to their parents
- Removing posts about surveillance of LGBTQ+ people in r/privacy for contradictory or unexplained reasons
- The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.
Is all criticism now a “mob” just because they don’t want people with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views to have the power to censor others?
- The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.
From what I saw, the admins actually said that they were fine with keeping him on the moderation team and the mod deleted their own accounts
- Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.
Are they? The most I saw was that people were considering leaving because other instances were going to start blocking Fosstodon
What is with the concealing and downplaying of the mod’s views and then exaggerating the “outrage” of the “mob”? Yes the Fediverse can be drama-prone but most of the fanning of the flames seems to be coming from the people complaining about Fedi users genuine criticisms of the mods/admins on Fosstodon
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to remove mod privileges for these kinds of views if you’re trying to run an inclusive space. There’s supported suspicion that they’ve used their mod powers to censor information on minorities already, just because they haven’t done it yet on this platform doesn’t mean you let them lie in wait to do it. Makes me worry that Fosstodon admins don’t see any issues keeping someone like that around
Would this get the same kind of backlash had the mod been kicked out for tankie views?
Just to respond to point (6): From the blog post, there is a link to a post from someone moving from fosstodon to hachyderm that says:
Overall I’m satisfied with the moderation process and neutrality on Fosstodon. What to do? As a Fosstodon user, it’s hard to see any future path with the instance that works in my favor. (…) Most will never know anything about the name other than “the instance which allowed a nazi mod”. While I believe the characterization is 100% untrue and unfair, the die is cast for lots of people.
If I stay, the likely outcomes are:- Limited communication with some other people, because some other instance mods will choose to block Fosstodon
- Will have to explain my choices and the highlights of this post any time someone says “eeeww, Fosstodon”, occasionally and probably forever
- Some people will incorrectly assume I hold certain views based on my association with fosstodon
So, yes, at least one person is moving to another instance not because they are particularly against the admins, but for fear of being judged by association.
- The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.
My understanding was that this mod’s accounts disappeared from everywhere (including Reddit), not just Fosstodon. So, I think they deleted their accounts themselves to avoid the backlash or something.
So, the usual “on the Fediverse you shalln’t be anything less than immaculately perfect” crap?
there’s a difference between not being perfect and supporting outing trans children.
Yet the mob not only punishes for the former, but does it so instance-wide, needlessly tarnishing the reputation of normal users of the instance while the admins moderated that problem on their own.
Punishing people by transitivity only gets communities so far.
The 11th commandment.
Some kind of mod drama
In recent days, there has been a minor furor across the fediverse related to one of the moderators at fosstodon
From the link in the link
Alas, not everyone on the fediverse is so friendly and welcoming towards people who “express certain political views” by using a position of power to suppress those they disagree with.
I’m having trouble parsing your sentence. Do you mean that the mods/admins of fosstodon were using their position of power to suppress anyone?
That is what their mod was accused of having done, albeit on reddit. If Kev believes those allegations to be unfounded, he’s done a poor job of expressing that.
That is what their mod was accused of having done
He was accused of lots of things. But was there any concrete evidence of that? All I saw was a comment from reddit where he said something stupid.
It’s not as if I did an exhaustive search to sift through all the evidence, but what I found was this: https://lemm.ee/post/60365167
Thank you. I wouldn’t take it hard evidence of anything, but I did miss the part where he was actually a mod on Reddit as well.
deleted by creator
We just can’t have nice things…
