I’ve only had a single moderator event since I made this account, well over a year ago except a featuring & unfeaturing of a post - huh, I didn’t even know about that one!).

Then one day I wake up with like 10 bans in my notifications area, from what looks to be pro-AI communities. They did not merely claim to be acting on the safe side with a generic message, they specifically called me names as in an “Anti-AI Troll”. Fwiw I consider myself as someone who desires a more nuanced view of how LLM usage might be appropriate in various real-world scenarios than your average Lemming. It’s not my fault that corporations are deploying technology before it is ready and that the results are exceedingly untrustworthy right now - though ironically I was actually thinking about trying to find a legitimately more helpful and nuanced place that allows those kinds of discussions. Naive optimism is a biased method of thinking, but so too is pessimism, and if at all possible I prefer realism. And I don’t want to exist purely inside of an echo chamber, you know?

Which is why I avoid Lemmy.ml communities and users, and apparently I need to start doing the same with dbzer0 ones as well. They aren’t quite part of the Tankie Triad, but highly ironically, their admins allow mods that are instead somehow even more authoritarian than them? Like, I’ve never actually been banned by Lemmy.ml on any of my accounts (that I am aware of) - probably bc I do avoid those communities. While on the other hand dbzer0 (apparently) preemptively instance-banned me 4 times in a row last week - not even unbanning me in between them, just like stuttering or mashing the ban button EXTRA hard! Edit: this is starting to look more and more like a bug in PieFed’s modlog display, as in displaying a blank community name or some such, thank you to dbzer0 for correcting me here. I will leave the graphic because it is funny and because it still applies to all the mods on dbzer0 who are enabled and protected by but not actually the same as the admin team.

Now I know what people mean when they said that being banned from Lemmy.ml was a badge of honor, good riddance! I do find it sad that others are still going to have to discover this on their own though, as dbzer0 converts to authoritarianism like Lemmy.ml (and AN seems on its way to becoming a second Hexbear). A year or so ago, I had true respect for dbzer0 - especially the head admin. I don’t know what happened exactly but I don’t like the result one bit:-(.

Anyway yeah, I can’t fight back against these abusive words, and if an instance decides to ban me four times a day for the foreseeable future, there is nothing is can do about that either - it almost seems like people are weaponizing the modlog, or at least revealing that someone could do that if they wanted to. I guess it is up to each instance what level of abusiveness they want to allow to their users from these shitty modlog practices. My own “fight” (that I did not realize I was even in?) with them seems over, but this absolutely will affect MANY other users as well.

As the OP graphs show - these numbers reflect REAL events, with REAL stories behind them, affecting REAL people.