Seriously, Reddit has banned me several times for “breaking rules” but never tells me exactly what I did to deserve the ban, whereas I see that Lemmy will tell you in the modlog what you did.
Seriously, Reddit has banned me several times for “breaking rules” but never tells me exactly what I did to deserve the ban, whereas I see that Lemmy will tell you in the modlog what you did.
The public modlog is one of the best features of Lemmy, IMO. When a Lemmy user appeals to the public of stuff mods/admins have done, we can call BS on them since we can read through stuff if they’ve been toxic, or if it’s the mods on a power-trip, or if it’s controversially borderline but reasonable discretion given the circumstances.
You can call BS, sure, but nothing happens other than the mods/admins just banning you as well and/or covering their tracks better. It’s no better than reddit in actually preventing bullshit mod actions.
I grant you that it’s not perfect and it doesn’t prevent the abuse in the first place, but calling it out is important. There are still plenty of dramata about people DMing each other, but there’s less hearsay involved with the ban actions themselves. Appropriate suspicion is cast upon any mod that’s too vague with their ban comments or any user that doesn’t want to reveal their old banned username.
In terms of what users can do about mod abuse: There have been coordinated community shifts in response. A couple examples:
!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone was created because the !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone mods wanted to forcibly move the community to !196@lemmy.world, but most users didn’t like that because BZ has more LBGTQ+ friendly policy. So the new community got set up with new mods.
!risa@startrek.website more or less moved or splintered to !tenforward@lemmy.world after some mod beefing and people getting banned for some rules even though it was a “no real rules” community.
One of the biggest issues here is, like reddit, most of the ban actions are shown as just being done by “mod”, not giving the specific mod account that did it.
It also got rid of some toxic mods since their actions are also public.
I remember a Reddit powermod complaining about it after the big migration.
The mod log certainly helps, because it leaves a public trail of evidence for each ban, but it ultimately still depends on the server admin, because they are in charge of choosing their mods. But at least no one can ban you from the platform entirely, at worst you can get banned from an entire instance.
I didn’t know that. I think on reddit that would have creeped me out but I might not end up minding as much here.