I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
This is a pretty disappointing post Rimu. It appears very out of character from your usual content and feels like a bit of a hit piece.
Also why post it to !fediverse@lemmy.world when you have !fediverse@piefed.social?
Why is this out of character? It’s entirely like Rimu to stir up drama against leftist instances.
Reminder that Rimu hates leftists and anti-fascists more than racists and fascists.
Yep.
What is the modlog for, if not holding moderators to account?
What’s to ‘account’ for banning people?
Do moderators reflect instances or communities?
If communities have high rates of bad-faith posters engaging to troll and harass them, is that something that needs to be held to ‘account’?
Well, I think you make good points. But I also think this information that has been posted is valuable.
Instances and communities are inevitably reflective of the moderators who curate them. Depending on the moderation decisions, the communities and instances naturally evolve as some stuff gets removed/banned, and other stuff gets encouraged.
If communities have high rates of trolls, then naturally they would have higher rates of banning. But the discrepancy visualized here is of a much greater scale than could be explained by mere variations in user/troll activity, imo. It’s fairly obvious that different servers have different standards for moderation, and I think that’s a good thing.
more ruminations
I think the issue being danced around in this thread is the latent assumption that servers with a high amounts of bans are somehow undesirable or problematic. I don’t necessarily agree with that assumption. Although I obviously prefer an extremely minimal censorship paradigm for me personally, I actually don’t think that such an environment is beneficial or desirable for most users. Despite the fact that everyone likes to imagine themselves as open minded and intellectually independent, in reality most people simply aren’t. We seek communities that reinforce our preconceptions and try to protect ourselves from dissenting and hostile voices, because it’s emotionally draining to live in a state of constant conflict and argument.
On a personal level, it does give me great satisfaction to know that my server is permissive and hands-off. But that’s only because I’m comfortable discussing opinions that dbzer0 or blahaj users would consider as transphobic hate speech. So if I have to bear the label of transphobe as a result of my openness to discussing and/or questioning certain topics, it seems only fair that the people labeling me as such should have to bear the label of ban-happy. FWIW I still feel that we agree on the vast majority of topics and I prefer to focus on that rather than the handful of topics of disagreement that seem to monopolize the majority of attention.
But yeah, if you really believe that people are causing harm by posting certain things and you choose to ban them as a result, stand by your decision. Like sure, we banned a lot of people because they were transphobic, or Zionist, or ableist, and we don’t allow that here. I can respect that, even if I don’t 100% agree with it.
So idk, I think there is a bit of frustration and competition between different servers at times and that is coming through in this post. But in the greater perspective, the fediverse as a whole benefits from a diversity of moderation styles, so it should be a point of pride for us as fediverse users rather than a point of argument between us as denizens of our individual servers.
Well said.
Rimu has always been interested in creating a fediverse with good moderation. One side of that is piefed’s great moderation tools, another side is posts like this looking at the data on the moderation that’s being done. This is a very typical Rimu post through that lens.
Rimu has always been an opinionated person who injects his own feelings into the code to ban things he doesn’t like.
I wonder how many ‘bans’ Rimu would have under his belt if we added the effects of multiple PieFed instances blacklisting communities for the word ‘meme’ and other hard-coded pettiness.