Tl;dr:
- these are old events, 9 months ago.
- we have since then mostly moved on, but I still thought it could be interesting to document those in this community
- the power trip was a single mod not wanting to discuss how a community should be run and banning people wanting to discuss it
- the new communities we created following this power trip (!movies@lemm.ee and !showsandmovies@lemm.ee) are now more active than the initial one
Hello everyone,
I added the summary of the event in the tl;dr above. If you are here, you probably want to know the details of what happened.
Starting point
As you may remember, there used to be a movie focused instance called lemmy.film. Following its shutdown, a few users were looking for a new movies and TV shows community that would not be on Lemmy.world (if you want to know why some people are against overcentralization on Lemmy.world, you can have a look here: https://lemm.ee/post/30444527 and https://feddit.uk/post/18336398 )
While I was contacting the lemm.ee admins to become mod of the at the time abandoned movies@lemm.ee, another mod (I’ll just call them “The mod” in this thread) created !moviesandtv@lemm.ee. We contacted the other people who were on the old lemmy.film communities and started posting.
I posted a lot over there, if you sort by Old, you’ll see a lot of my posts from back then: https://lemm.ee/c/moviesandtv?dataType=Post&sort=Old
I was also trying to set up discussion threads as they were things who were missing on Lemmy at the time, and a lot of people were complaining about that
I also started asking for a weekly thread “What have you been watching”: https://lemm.ee/post/13386100 which was denied. It wasn’t a big deal for me, I was mostly focused on growing the community, I assumed that we could revisit that topic later. That was on 31 October 2023.
Success for the community
12 November, we celebrate our 300 subs: https://lemm.ee/post/14621123
17 November, I start a weekly thread: https://lemm.ee/post/15176837. 7 comments, reasonable success for a first.
26 November, I am appointed as mod: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863, and start pinning the weekly threads.
4 December, I am removed as mod. I ask the mod to make me mod again (purely because it’s easier to pin threads), they never answer.
10 December, I open another thread on how to handle movie discussions: https://lemm.ee/post/17546624
I let it go for 6 weeks, I keep posting, after all, this is more or less okay. By then, the community has around 1100 subscribers.
The power trip
30 January, I open a thread to discuss with people in the community how they wanted to handle movie reviews:
The post get removed
I open another thread “Are we not allowed to discuss the way this community is managed?”
I get banned
I use an alt to comment
Hello, As you banned my other account, I am now commenting with this one. I’m not going to comment on this that much, the modlog is public, people interested can have a look at make their own opinions. For history, the two removed posts: (screenshots) I guess we can just conclude that we disagree on how to manage this kind of communities, which is mostly fine, that’s what Lemmy is about after all: freedom. I’ll probably contact the people interested in review threads (and there seems to be a few, based on the removed threads and the 200 upvotes on the other post) and see it we can offer an alternative for people looking for a more structured community. Good luck
Comments gets removed: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863
The mod then posts how they want to address the community issues: https://lemm.ee/post/22459747
My alt gets banned.
Please not that those are permabans. Up to this day, I am still banned on those two accounts from that community.
The aftermath
Let’s be honest here, I was a bit annoyed. I had been actively posting to a community, helping building it from scratch from months, to get banned just for asking how we could manage this community better.
I reached out to sunaurus, the lemm.ee main admin, who told me that he couldn’t do anything, as his admin policy was to not interfere with mod decisions. It’s a fair policy that I could understand (even though I was still annoyed). They made me mod of movies@lemm.ee, and I thought I would take it from there.
I built !movies@lemm.ee with the same energy I had put in the previous community. I found other people who had seen the drama happening on the other side and wanted to join forces in building another community. I appointed all of them as mods, because why not.
Over time, our community became more and more popular, and now has 2.97k monthly active users, while !moviesandtv@lemm.ee has 1.52k
The mod had promised to add other mods to the community. They did for 4 months (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863) but then removed them in June 2024.
In the meantime, they also banned another user in April 2024 for similar reasons to the ones used for me: https://lemm.ee/post/30754133
They also removed the AMA we organized in May 2024 on !movies@lemm.ee (https://lemm.ee/post/31335226) because “Unvarified AMA not organized by this community - seems like spam” (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863)
More recently, we started a !showsandmovies@lemm.ee community, which now has 2.35k monthly active users.
That’s it.
I agree. Although each instance can run themselves as they see fit, the idea that a community is the fiefdom of the Mods seems a holdover from Reddit which was, at least until recently, almost too big to manage. I’ve been helping run online communities for a long time and when it was a forum on a site, you had a responsibility to make sure it was run as well as it could be. Lemmy feels like a return to that era.
My take is that it isn’t my instance, I run it for the users and this should apply to the Mods too.