this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025

26 points (71.7% liked)

Ye Power Trippin' Bastards

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185 users here now

This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.

Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.

Posting Guidelines

All posts should follow this basic structure:

Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

Rules

Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
Don’t use private communications to prove your point. We can’t verify them and they can be faked easily.
Don’t deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
Don’t harass mods or brigade comms. Don’t word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
You can post about power trippin’ in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
If you are the accused PTB, while you are welcome to respond, please do so within the relevant post.

Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.

Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.

YTPB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.

Some acronyms you might see.

PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
CLM - Clueless mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.

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what’s the opposite of power tripping? (lemmy.cafe)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by spujb@lemmy.cafe to c/yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This user did ~~hours~~ over a day of violent and transphobic hate speech and was not banned due to absentee admins. And when admins finally take action it’s for “userbase request”?

Uhhhhh? Am I missing something? SDF admins don’t seem to be willing to operate a community as a community of 4k users.

No hate to the admins if they are underpaid or whatever. SDF just needs to appoint reachable and bare minimally invested admins, and if they can’t maybe shouldn’t be running a Lemmy instance; it’s not really a “set it and forget it” deal.

top 19 comments

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[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 28 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Getting an admin response within hours sounds extremely reasonable to me, TBH. You may want to reconsider your expectations of free services, this is coming across pretty entitled.

[–] spujb@lemmy.cafe 19 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I edited the wording to be clearer for those who haven’t been keeping up with recent PTB posts. To clarify, it was over a day.

With that in mind, a day is absolutely a reasonable timeframe for an instance with 4,000 users to expect action—though calling it "entitlement" is a rather skewed perspective. This concerns the safety of a lot of users, who were essentially left unprotected.

If SDF lacks the resources to maintain safety, they should at the very least disable automatic approvals for new users and communities, which, as I understand, had not been done at the time of writing this post. They should consider recruiting volunteer admins and adding Matrix contacts to the instance sidebar for urgent abuse cases like CSAM.

Again, I have no ill will toward the team—I'm simply reporting what happened and what we should hope to see addressed moving forward.

[–] phlegmy@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I agree with most of your points, and they should definitely look into getting more active moderators on their instance.

But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by safety?
They took less than 2 days, but the way you word it sounds like someone was going to die because the 'content' was up for more than 24 hours?

Idk, this whole thing just feels like an over-exaggerated response to something that could have been handled with a simple report.

[–] spujb@lemmy.cafe 3 points 2 weeks ago

someone else pointed out that my tone in the original post is a little more pointed than perhaps i intended and i think that is fair.

im really just here to report and keep folks in the loop on the subject.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 weeks ago

Fair enough! I guess the tone of your post comes across as more complaining than constructive. Your comments sound a lot different :)

[–] jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This took over a day. My whole concern was that it was very bad and was making the org behind the instance look horrible.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Let's not pickup the pitchforks based on just the ban string. However I agree that the situation where the admins are absent is very suboptimal. They need to assign some people from their instance that are active and ready to respond.

PS: The opposite would be "They deserved it".

[–] jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I am more than willing to do this. I really love the culture we have on SDF. Problem is that they are sysadmins, not instance admins.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 weeks ago

Exactly. I'm primarily a sysadmin as well, but first of all I "dogfood" my own lemmy constantly, (i.e. I didn't set it up just for others) and second first thing I did is onboard more admins to help.

[–] spujb@lemmy.cafe 4 points 2 weeks ago

not here for pitchforks, just want what’s best for all their users :)

[–] jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

We spammed all communication channels to wake the admin up. Just a bit ago, the troll activated again with and the admin was ontop of it within the hour

[–] spujb@lemmy.cafe 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I’m glad they are at least reachable again. I hope they can at least find a handful of admin volunteers to cover user safety concerns across time zones. That should absolutely be possible out of 4,000 users but definitely needs to be done.

Honestly makes me proud of my instance which has 500 users but 4 admins, all of whom respond often within the hour!

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 weeks ago

Lemmy.cafe is nice

[–] redrumBot@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What's the problem with that reason? It's better to ban the troll fast that to check and evaluate the (hundred) reports pending.

Also, all my support to the sdf admins. I can't understand all this pressing against the non bigger instances, they are doing free work for all of us.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago

Checking just one, or the user account itself, would be sufficient.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 15 points 2 weeks ago

The opposite of power tripping would be negligence.

The ban message is sloppy, and the time to take action was too long, but the actions (ban + removal of comm) were the right call. They probably need more admins, specially to cover hours that others can't.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What?

Are any of the instance admins anywhere paid? It's not the norm for sure. Who would be paying them?

[–] jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 weeks ago

SDF admins are paid through the non-profit. So are most in a similar way on larger instances.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 weeks ago

It would be sloppy or negligent. I know they responded and they actually resolved the issue, but they responded late and they don't seem to actually care. Otherwise they would have indicated that the user broke the rules, not just that the userbase wanted them gone. It also implies that they don't see what is wrong with Ashton's hateful posts promoting transphobia and alt-right Nazism, which is concerning just to say the least.

I know that people are going to excuse them for this, on the basis of being a "free service", which is kind of meaningless because paid services these days are just as bad or worse. So not a good excuse to dissipate criticism. No criticism of their practices is absolutely valid and warranted. Especially because it is a Fediverse service. Therefore even if you don't use it, it is still your problem that they don't moderate and don't care due to federation.

Just to be clear I'm an SDF member and I have been with them for a few years, and I think their intentions are noble, but I also think they tend to not put as much care and effort as they should into some of their services. The fact that it was as difficult as it was to get them to update from a version with broken federation shows that. They need to bring in more active admins, write a list of rules, and maybe most importantly. Come up with a way to keep spammers at bay. I suggested that they require people be Validated SDF members to join the Lemmy as that would basically eliminate all spam or trolling while still allowing it to be accessible for all the people who really want it.