/0 Governance

My take is that we leave some leeway to moderators of our comms to handle them as they see fit, because they are the ones growing them primarily and we need them to feel somewhat in control and invested for all the effort they're putting it.

There's limits of course, but I don't feel their actions exceed those limits, as those bans don't really affect the users being banned, and if it wasn't for the modlog and some notifications people get about it, they wouldn't even notice as they don't ever interact with those comms except downvoting them in the occasional /all post.

We also need to be cognizant on why some mods take such seemingly "extreme" reactions. Not everyone has as thick a skin as to tolerate a constant dogpile of bad faith arguments, and those people still deserve to exist in the internet and in the threativerse, and for their mental health, these people might need tighter control of their comms to prevent people who would cause them mental anguish.

The topic of GenAI is very heated and we're the only instance which is explicitly not againt GenAI as a technology (but still against corporate GenAI and its hype). Because of how hated it is, especially in the more radical spaces, we constantly get hate drive-by comments in every post containing any sort of GenAI image, and when they can't comment, they downvote. The mods actions are colored by these interactions and their attempts to combat these behaviours. Point is, these comms and our instance don't act in a vacuum, so the larger reaction to GenAI needs to be taken into account to understand.