this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Actual Discussion
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Are you tired of going into controversial threads and having people not discuss things, circlejerking, or using emotional responses in place of logic? Us too.
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We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I'm placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.
This week, I'd like to discuss something that's been a bit of an issue for me personally.
Lemmy (and Reddit before it) appears to have a problem with overly-aggressive bannings for perceived slights. In the topic linked above there were people permanently banning users from multiple communities (any they moderate - dozens in some cases) for single downvotes, 4 downvotes across a ten-month period, and bannings because a moderator thought they maybe sorta kinda read that a user may have had a negative thought about their pet issue.
I've personally been banned from Communities (and sent some pretty vile PMs) for posting in our weekly threads here playing devil's advocate where I state hard questions that I do not necessarily feel are correct. They think they've discovered some secret agenda by finding posts I've made here and use them as "receipts" in order to dismiss anything they think they're reading that may be contrary to their opinion. Any context provided for the post falls on deaf ears.
I'm someone who operates on the idea of "If you can not defend an opinion from scrutiny, you should probably not hold that opinion."
To quote myself:
It’s pretty tragic that people can't handle opposing opinions. I think the activist nature of Lemmy is kind of a self-destructive spiral and people need to learn how to live with each other again. But I guess that’s the issue with modern social media as a whole… Nobody has any idea how to convince anyone else, only to yell at them louder.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- Are niche Communities correct for banning anyone who downvotes?
- Do downvotes represent a "disagree" button for you (this Community notwithstanding)?
- Most importantly, what would it take to change this?
- Does it help build the Community? What about the platform as a whole?
- Is there a way to build a "safe space" without building an echo chamber online? Is that even a valuable thing to build?
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Lemmy communities are not businesses, usually they are just hobby projects run by people in their free time. So a closer analogy is that posting in someone's community is like being in their house (or garden). And when you're in someone's house they are free to throw you out for any reason.
I get that. It's a solid analogy, but on the other hand you also have some people who run a dozen or more Communities. To borrow your analogy, these people claim whole unrelated neighbourhoods and permanently remove you from all of them for accidentally stepping on their lawn 3 towns over. This absolutely is a problem as I see it. It hurts discussion and discoverability.
Well this is where lemmy being federalised plays out. On Reddit, a community is basically completely captured by the first-movers if it has the name people are going to look up first. Lemmy allows people to compete with the same name, on different instances - and even on the same instance as the display name can be different to the original URL.
I agree that you can do that stuff, but most people don't have the time or wish to do it. Instead, they just get turned off the Community (or even platform) altogether and just... leave.
Even if they do start their own Community, that's not even a sure way to stop it. As I described above, I have been banned from other Communities for playing devils advocate in my own Community.
Well this stuff can just as viably happen on Reddit.
Oh, absolutely. It's worse on Reddit without a doubt!
Its definitely a problem. One way to fix it would be for admins to be more strict with the moderators of local communities, and replace them if they go too far. But it seems most admins are quite hands off and prefer to let things run their course.
We almost need like... some kind of "Supreme Court" or Mod review system. One way or another, it's a really hard problem to solve for certain.
Thats not possible because instances are completely independent from each other, and one one can force admins to do anything (except their local governments and hosting providers). So different instances will always have different standards, and at most other instances can defederate if they disagree.