this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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/0 Governance

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I was encouraged to create an governance thread for discussion dedicated to community focused around the db0 lemmy instance users. Please see the linked post for context. I decided to leave my original post for potential discussion including voices of outsiders.

In short, not to duplicate information - I'd like to ask our community the following questions:

  1. Is the mod's behaviour of proactively banning users from moderated communities without clear violation in accordance to the instance rules, especially The Golden Rules, which call for "cooperative participation"?
  2. If yes, what actions can be proposed to be taken next to alleviate the issue, not only with the two directly mentioned communities in the linked post, but also others that potentially fall a victim to this kind of mod misbehaviour?

It should also be appropriate to hear the stance of the involved moderators, why they do what they do, but obviously it is up to them to provide clarifications.

Thank you in advance, I love you all.

governance type: sense check

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[–] MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 days ago (28 children)

Hi I'm the mod of these two communities, so I'm going to give my input on this. Basically this started back when I began before I started my first community and I noticed that other AI communities receive a surprisingly large amount of downvotes, however when I started my first community !stable_diffusion_mycology@lemmy.dbzer0.com I found that number to be much higher, and when I looked into the Voter data I found that it was being brigaded from users who moderate !fuck_ai@lemmy.world as well as very active participants there. So I made a decision that instead of allowing them to suppress and hurt my community I would ban the ones who do it so they can't hurt my community. Eventually I found that that wasn't enough because there were too many of them just waiting to take the place of banned users, so I started screening users by post history, and if they made bad faith anti-AI arguments I banned them, and yes I also used posts like the linked one as honeypots to catch other Anti-AI trolls who would complain about banning. When I began !stable_diffusion_witches@lemmy.dbzer0.com I transferred the bans from my already established community because I knew that these same people would continue at it again.

I know that these people will not block and ignore these communities on their own, they are intentionally trying to suppress it, some of them have actually admitted to doing such and saying they won't block posts. If it's considered unacceptable or against the rules to ban people in this manner then that means it's essentially impossible to fight large scale brigading and hate voting like this, which I do not think is fair for people wanting to start communities here.

In addition to simply brigading my communities I have had people harass me in DMs, make death threats towards me, and make fun of me for being a recovering alcoholic. I've had these people deny my gender identity, claim I'm a woman, deliberately use the wrong pronouns, and even one person impersonating me while acting like a pig. Really vile stuff.

In short these are not knee jerk reactions, the vast majority of the bans I cast are for good reasons, and while I have made mistakes on occasion, the majority of these bans are correct, and I don't believe we should be forced to allow known problematic users to hurt our communities just because they haven't left comments there yet.

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