Yesterday I was reading the post about the FUTO keyboard where there were a lot of messages deleted by moderators.
I’ve commented there
What the heck happened with all the messages deleted by moderator?
And it got deleted. Right now you can only see 4, but I’ve counted 19 messages moderated and the post has been locked. Why?
I’ve had a look ad the modlog and the messages don’t seems to violate any policy (now they’ve removed them in the modlog too).
I’m pinging here lemmy.ml admin and the mods of the open source community where the post was posted so they can have their say about it and clarify the situation to me.
@kevincox@lemmy.ml @CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml
@Cloak@lemmy.ml @davel@lemmy.ml @dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml @JoeBidet@lemmy.ml @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml
If I’m getting something wrong, please let me know, I’m here to discus and understand if I’m getting something wrong or if something went wrong in the moderation. Thanks!
Down here you can see the deleted comments.
P.s. I’m writing here because I think that this post on lemmy.ml wouldn’t last long.
Mod locked the thread because FUTO isn’t an open source org. They even pinned their comment stating as much. Fuck off
Actually, that’s not true, or not complete.
The mod deleted a bunch of comments in a post about open source keyboards, because discussion of FUTO was offtopic, because it’s not open source. So then there was a separate post about FUTO specifically, and a little bit of lively discussion about whether FUTO was the good guys or the bad guys, with the mod deleting comments drawn from a specific 50% of that division, and finally they said:
I am locking this thread to avoid needing to remove misinformation and advocacy from Futo fans who think they should be allowed to redefine a term which there has been consensus about the definition of since before they were born.
So, they were okay with discussion of FUTO, just not with people saying things they didn’t agree with, and they considered it tedious to have to remove so many of the comments under the post leaving only the comments they (edit:
disagreed) agreed with. So they locked the post.Its their comm they can do what they want just as you can on yours. Why not just start another discussion on one of the many comms you moderate?
You just like it when that happens so you can start flame war bullshit
Why not just start another discussion
We did, and you came in yelling at us that we needed to stop.
You posted an entire thread to yell at us
- D: “Mod locked the thread because FUTO isn’t an open source org. They even pinned their comment stating as much.”
- A: “Fuck off” “flame war bullshit” “Holy shit don’t you have anything better to post about”
- RVO: Please stop posting about our behavior, it’s ever so rude, you’re yelling at me, just say nothing, I prefer it that way
I’m not OP and I didn’t yell at anybody. I shared my opinion about moderation, the reasons why lemmy.ml’s is wrong, and why it matters. In a community which is devoted to that type of discussion. The moderator also shared their opinion and was widely upvoted. We all got some clarity.
Not everything that upsets you personally is a “flamewar” or needs to stop right now because you decree it.
OP started this thread to try and discredit our mod. That is an attack. Me posting how said OP is in the wrong is not attacking, it is responding to an attack.
They did not start a new thread to continue the FUTO discussion elsewhere. If they truly wanted to discuss that topic, they would have done so. Instead they made this thread.
Not to mention they just had to inject their tInYmAn sQuArE bullshit into it.
OP started this thread to try and discredit our mod. That is an attack.
OP said, “If I’m getting something wrong, please let me know, I’m here to discus and understand if I’m getting something wrong or if something went wrong in the moderation. Thanks!”
They did not start a new thread to continue the FUTO discussion elsewhere.
Yes they did. Their original conversation was arguably offtopic in the open source keyboard discussion. So, when it was deleted there, they started a new post, but unfortunately not realizing that FUTO was on the list of official enemies, and so people aren’t allowed to have a conversation about it. To me, and OP, that’s weird. We’re allowed to say that, and be critical of the moderation policy, without it being an “attack.” So, in keeping, they started a whole separate discussion about the moderation. But their whole point originally was to discuss this keyboard thing and maybe learn some things about it.
In my opinion, once you take control of someone else’s environment, you’re opening yourself up for your decisions to be criticized, whether or not the criticism is “fair” or whether or not you agree with it. That’s how it works. Claiming that anyone who doesn’t like how you’re wielding your power, and talks about it, is “attacking” you and so you need to respond to the attack is… well, on brand for pro-authoritarian spaces, I guess. That’s just not my culture.
They even pinned their comment stating as much. Fuck off
flame war bullshit
Holy shit don’t you have anything better to post about
who shat in your cereal, lmao
.ml has long been known to remove dissenting voices of any kind (Ironic because they always accuse .world and other instances like .ee of becoming echo chambers), especially voices that rightfully criticize their favored authoritarian governments such as China or Russia. Usually though those are removed under their catchall “RULE1 bigotry”
It’s a little weird to remove software related comments for being off topic when they’re clearly not, but this is a by-product of that moderation culture the Tankie Admins and Mods (Yes the main dev Nutomic (and transphobe, see stickied post in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works ) and major mods like dess are full bore tankies) pushed.
Oh, and don’t bother tagging any .ml users, .ml hates their rank-and-file members from seeing the dissent against .ml so has blocked !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and I believe this comm as well on their instance. They’ll also site-ban individuals that dare talk against them, even when that talk is exclusively on other instances.
PS, generally the people who say “They never have any issues” are Tankies themselves or at least align with that mindset enough that they can go for a while without a negative interaction.
I didn’t know, I’m mainly active on lemmy.world. How can that instance have so much traction?
First movers advantage, .ml is the first and “flagship” instance, the rest of the Tankie Triad (Hexbear and grad) followed closely after, though .world has defed from those because they were not as subtle on their “viewpoints” as .ml tries to be to avoid getting defed’d from, so you probably haven’t even heard of those.
.ml also used to be the default instance on the join-lemmy website which is also run by Nutomic, but recently they changed the recommendation algo so that it would no longer recommend instances with >30% of the user base Lemmy-wide to include .ml and .world.
The hope is that someday .world will finish what it started and defed from the last remaining on the Tankie Triad, but until then the best recommendation is just not interact with it at all. No posts or comments or upvotes. If you want to take a more active roll, if you do see an actual good post on a .ml comm, crosspost it to the nearest non-.ml comm
The hope is that someday .world will finish what it started and defed from the last remaining on the Tankie Triad,
Well, maybe another instance. The more populated instance, the better. Federation is here to avoid centralization, no?
Yea, but many of the other instances already do, in fact now that I think about it
I think DB0 (this instance) defed’s from the complete Tankie Triadnvm they don’t.world defed’ing them as the goal is that way because .world is like double the size of the next largest instance, so it will help the rest of the Lemmy-verse look more like the tankies are “Just a fringe group running their own servers” rather than being the Lemmy-verse (of that make sense)
As far as making .world too centralized in general, I do also advise if you’re going to be posting more, the best thing for the overall health of Lemmy is to try to pick non-.world comms to post to even if they’re a little slower in traffic. So like !science@mander.xyz instead of !science@lemmy.world
DB0 (this instance) defed’s from the complete Tankie Triad
Dbzer0 only defederates grad: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/instances
@kevincox@lemmy.ml @CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml @Cloak@lemmy.ml @davel@lemmy.ml @dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml @JoeBidet@lemmy.ml @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml
Yes, you are the most important person in the Lemmyverse and the removal of misposting of non-open source content to an open source community is the most important thing happening in the Lemmyvarse. So pinging all the admins and mods is perfectly reasonable behavior. Everyone should stop whatever they’re doing and pay attention to you.
Meh, it’s no different than creating a report. I get an email for every report made on programming.dev, someone pinging the admins isn’t/shouldn’t be a big deal.
When you make a report, the first mod who comes across it deals with it and clears it, and none of the other mods’ time is wasted on it.
When you @ all the mods, all the mods are alerted and everyone’s time is wasted, because you think you’re the main character.
I don’t know how lemmy.ml has it configured, but at programming.dev every admin is notified by email when a report is made 1. By our users, 2. About our users and 3. On our communities. Pinging is less “intrusive” in that sense.
To be accurate, mentioning accounts in the body doesn’t ping people
Don’t mentions go to people’s inboxes?
Only from comments
seems bizarre to me. I’ve had no issue on .ml. Is this an instance issue or a com issue?
Personally, I have never had any issues either, although I have seen many people who have. People looking for an international decentralized community will have no problem with .ml, as with all other existing instances. Those looking for a reddit clone will have their own good reasons to detest .ml.
You’ve never had an ML issue? I… don’t believe you. Even when you’re not talking politics, their constant attempt to ruin your mood is pretty annoying.
Are any of them able to have a full conversation without making unfounded personal attacks? I’ve never had that experience.
I’d probably be all-in for communism if it weren’t for them.
I’ve had no issue on .ml
Wat
Lemmy.ml is explicitly affirming of the idea that the moderators determine what is the “right” opinion and remove all the wrong opinions. Ask them about Tienanmen Square or the Uyghurs. It’s a little unusual that it goes outside of the realm of geopolitics and into the realm of software projects, but it’s completely in keeping with their overall philosophy about what the right way is to run an instance.
The person who is removing posts is, I believe, not a moderator of that community, they’re an admin. So complaining to the admins is unlikely to get you anywhere.
“Don’t go to lemmy.ml” is my advice. There are replacement communities for almost everything that’s available there, for exactly this specific reason.
Holy shit don’t you have anything better to post about? You people are like broken records.
What a strange comment.
Sure would be nice if you could just delete my comment, wouldn’t it? Alas.
It’s about one-third just my own sour grapes, and about two-thirds that I for real want to warn people who are not aware that lemmy.ml operates this way. I definitely remember being shocked and surprised myself that it worked that way, when I first encountered it and my stuff got deleted, and I would have appreciated someone coming in and saying “No, you’re not crazy, that’s just how their moderation operates there, but yes it is weird.” So I try to turn around and do that for others. But I won’t deny that the first one-third of it is there, also. Hope that’s okay with you.
You mean you want people to know the moderators are active and have a very firm stance on what is acceptable in their comms?
Thanks!
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).
I’ve counted 19 messages moderated
Probably more than that even; more than I want to count. The modlog is public.
and the post has been locked.
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.
Holy shit. A .ml mod being reasonable and making mod decisions based on what’d best for the community instead of pure personal bias. Congratulations perhaps their is still hope for .ml to be redeemed and forgiven.
What did we do
Yeah, I don’t get it. You’re such sweet, lovable people.
I got banned for such language before…
hmmm
Banned. Rule 1 (whatever the fuck That means)
Yeah, Rossman getting in bed with people that are deliberately trying to dilute the meaning of open source really killed my opinion of him.
Who are some of those people? I’m still trying to get my bearings about this entire thing, I never heard of it before yesterday.
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.
The FSF has a list of licenses, but they specifically label the non-free ones and state they shouldn’t be called free software.
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:
First, some open source licenses are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free licenses. For example, Open Watcom is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately.
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:
i totally agree that it is often preferable to allow misinformed comments to remain so that they can be refuted.
in the case of futo, though, i feel like there are often actually some bad-faith actors who just want to keep the discussion going…
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.
For example, Open Watcom is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately. Fortunately, few programs use such licenses.
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.
Rare ml w
