Banned over fish joke

UPDATE: The Unbans are showing up on modlog now.: ::: spoiler unban log screenshot

:::

~~I have traded the month-long ban in the many communities for a 6-day ban in vegan@lemmy.dbzero.com, which is a more reasonable ban~~. this ban has also been lifted now. I appreciate the cooperation from the mod over this misunderstanding.

So it seems i've gotten a month-long ban in..... over 30 communities across lemmy.dbzer0.com, sopuli.xyz, lemmy.ca, programming.dev, and several others, for this comment here.

It's directly replying to a comment saying they can't imagine why anyone thought otherwise about fish feeling pain, which is reasonable. You might notice the quotation marks, because it's satirizing people's mental gymnastics about fishes' pain perception. It was meant in jest, exclusively.

It seems likely that a single mod took this joke wrong and chose to ban me on every community they have control over.

210 comments

That's quite extreme. PTB.
- I meant to just ban them from the vegan community on db0. I will reverse this.
  
  also not justifiable. your bans are ridiculous
  
  How does someone accidentally ban people across multiple communities and instances? Is there a ban from everything I moderate button?
  
  much appreciated, that makes more sense.
  
  That makes more sense :D I withdraw my PTB for a BPR since it does seem you misunderstood their comment.
Y'know, concentrating power in the hands of a single person / group defeats the purpose of decentralisation.
I can understand if the damage is limited to communities within a single instance, but when a ban is so far-reaching - across so many instances - it makes me wonder what's the point of choosing Lemmy over, say, Reddit.
It's still the same problem again, just with different people in charge - like Bluesky vs Twitter.
- lemmy fixes admin abuse, not mod abuse.
  
  It doesn't "fix" admin abuse either - see feddit.org situation. It only helps with admin abuse as the bans apply to part of the universe rather that to the entire Lemmy.
- Yeah, the problem of modreach is definitely not a solved problem. The other problem, of all discourse being directly controllable from on high by a profit-driven company, however, is solved by lemmy. I believe that was the original issue lemmy was meant to handle. And that problem does seem to be solved. We'll just have to handle the problem of public official reach the way we normally would.
- Not really.
  You can make your own instance and moderate it better. You can split up power however you want.
- thats why lemmy needs to adopt a crowd sourced, prestige based moderation system and get rid of individual mods
  
  Yeah no, this would not work well. Minorities often experience being downvoted in great number and out-ratioed by those that have no understanding of what they go through (your regular lemmy user). It would just result in the ultimate echo chamber where largely only liberal white cishets have anything to say. At least as things are now queers can have a queer instance and feel safe there, even if things are not ideal.
  
  Crowd sourced moderation squashes small voices, squashes unpopular voices. It's not a good solution
  
  I can see how your modlog got so full. Are you always like this? How do you get but in the real world?
  
  Nah, because any mod that didn't subscribe to groupthink would get banned by you all.
  
  Like each person could vote things up or down, and if they vote them up they get more attention and down votes would bury the content!
- There's a fine line and I guess it can happen when one isn't experienced enough or jaded.
  For example, I don't think banning pitbull or staffie dogs is great. They are loving, loyal dogs if well-socialized by someone with the time, temperament, and consistency to do so. Banning these beautiful animals often means they are sent to shelters and euthanized wholesale, because they can't be placed . They didn't ask to be born, either.
  Nonetheless, when I saw a pinned post in the"Ban Pit Bulls” community, I refrained from posting, even if it did seem rather an incongruent view alongside militant veganism. I'd already argued my points which were vehemently rejected.
  But yptb just seems like a lot of whining by people unable to self-soothe and self-validate, imo, and I know people are going to be extremely offended by my saying so.
  
  When was this? The one I used to see in All got new moderation (the mod being discussed) who introduced, what I thought, were reasonable rules to encourage actual discourse.
  I get what you're saying about it before but, assuming they're being fairly enforced, I assume it's got to be better there now.
- Mods can accidentally hit the ban all option on the Tesseract frontend. Accidents do happen.
  Distrust me if you want to.
  
  how did OP get banned in servers from so many different instances?
The mod in common across all these servers is @Sunshine@lemmy.ca and her other alternate accounts on various servers.
Sunshine, if you see this, this is a pretty overkill response from you over what is a joke about the lengths people go to to lie to themselves. If you're thinking it was a bad joke still deserving a ban, at least diminish the sentence length down from a month to a few days instead. I will edit the post to communicate the lessened ban length.
- It's OK Sunshine, JayDee's made out of styrofoam.
  
  I'm sorry, but you're banned from every community I moderate now.
- Sunshine has a history of power tripping, and is able to avoid attention for it by using alts. As Beaver, they put the lemmy.world vegan community in trouble with admins over that vegan cat food drama, then later banned respected members of the community for "downvoting vegan comments". They were ostensibly de-modded when another mod spoke up, but if memory serves they actually still had their Sunshine alt on the mod list months later.
  
  Beaver is sunshine, or what?
the... scales... of justice are often harsh
- But fair when they are gill-ty
  
  Only with de-fin-itive evidence
After the 'update' I'm still confused how that is even worth a 6 day ban from the vegan community.
- They also walked that back a bit after.
  
  Right but 6 days for that makes vegans look absolutely nuts.
  Inb4 I'm banned for being anti vegan I'm literally 20 years vegan
Yikes, a mass ban over multiple communities for that? PTB
- Ada used to do this too before people started speaking up
  Mods and admins will always find a way to trip over the smallest amount of power.
  
  It is reddit modding behavior. They are censoring people they don't like
  
  You have no right to attack Ada for that.
- The ban across multiple communities is not intentional. I just meant to ban them from !vegan@lemmy.dbzer0.com. I was not used to Tesseract's ui. But even that was definitely jumping the gun upon rereading the joke.
  
  Why would you ban them from !vegan though, considering the comment was made in another community entirely? Even if we assume the comment was serious, you're basically saying the rules of the !vegan comm extend across the fediverse.
  
  Credit to you, sister. Coming here, updating your opinion and reporting it, is awesome. We need more mods like that.
PTB, if you were banned from vegan Comms I wouldn't really care, but a joke getting you banned from multiple non related Comms over several instances? Now that is crazy
- I thought i had a perm ban from them when i called them hypocrites for not caring for the feelings of vegetables. Saddly it was not
  
  They went too light on you
- PTB, if you were banned from vegan Comms I wouldn't really care,
  I would. He absolutely shouldn't be banned from vegan community for something he wrote in a different community.
- It's like the crossbans of reddit. As soon as you either comment and get banned from a sub, other subs that don't like your subs preemptively ban you
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog/1485815?page=1&actionType=All
IMHO this mod is out of control
- That is golden 😂
- Wow, they're just blatantly banning people who said something they disagree with now.
- Stay away from the vegan comms until you learn how to engage the topic in good faith
  https://lemmy.ca/post/45328032/16936477
  
  Lol ok powermod. PTB. Doubly so for banning over a comment on a totally seperate instance & community.
  
  I only engage in good faith.
Oh yeah ... that mod. Not the first time they did that, but this might be the pettiest one, yet.
PTB for sure.
Seems to be https://sh.itjust.works/u/Sunshine@lemmy.ca that's trigger happy.
- I did see that. She is a pretty active mod it seems.
  
  Well at least you got a great story to tell when people says the /s is unnecessary. :)
Seems weird that you got banned for a comment but the comment itself wasn't removed.
Anyway I think bans very often mean, "Your comment made me angry, so as a mod or admin I found a stick I can hit you with." And when it comes down to it, people who run websites don't have to publish anything they (or their proxies) don't like.
- The ban was for a different community. Sunshine saw their comment and went "that person sucks I'll ban them from my sub[s]"
  I don't think she was a mod where the comment was made
  Also she claims she accidentally hit "ban them from everywhere I moderate" instead of "also remove their posts and comments" so maybe the comment would have survived anyway
- That's a fair point. The point of this exercise is to ID people who behave like this so the people can decide if this the level of censorship they are willing to accept.
  If not, block offender, and move on. Fedi can accommodate everyone but not every has to interact.
  
  Important distinction - when the government controls what you can say, it's censorship. When you control what people say on your own website it's called having a website.
- Shout out to the time here that I suggested a mod block someone they didn't what to interact with and their response was "but as a kid I can't because I need to be able to see their comments" as if that makes using mod powers okay when you personally don't want to see something lol.
PTB - The humor could use a bit of work, that joke was reeling in so slowly, just flopping around like a....
- Yeah, you could argue that the entire thread was a bit fishy.
This platform just doesn't get satire or sarcasm, does it?
- Lemmy is the most black and white community I've encountered. Nuance is completely fucking lost here and god help you if you try to argue against the prevailing wind.
  
  You dropped the /s.
  
  Imma be banned now.
- Just from personal experience: there seems to be an undercurrent of opinion that sarcasm and irony lead us into narcissistic dystopia fast.
  As witnessed by the many ironic Redditches that turned bloody fast: There are just too many Psychopaths willing to take over and use it to lure the apparently plentiful masses of stupid people in (Biden-Bro and The-Donald come to mind).
  I know certainly myself have tried to make this place less toxic by beeing less sarcastic. It's not about getting it and more of a conscious choice for me. As a side effect, I feel less bitter or disconnected from my life, so that is a net win.
  Do I miss beeing an ironic, sarcastic ass sometimes? Absolutely. But it is not the good place I want to hang out at.
- I've seen that said about all online spaces. The reality is that communication is harder than people think. Speakers and writers think their intentions are obviously jovial. Listeners and readers think their intentions were obviously malicious. Tale as old as time.
- For most part it does, but there are a small number of people who have established their control over a portion of it and like to wield their authority. So basically like reddit, local politics, and pretty much every social situation.
  My most upvoted comments includes a lot of sarcasm, satire, and snark.
I didn't know PETA modded communities on Lemmy
- PETA would send the fish to a kill shelter
Fuck, i liked Sunshine too...
PTB
Glad they at least reversed it after getting caught
- And here I had them blocked within about a week of them showing up.
I honestly think substantial chunk of Lemmy mods are worse than these on Reddit. Just look at pro Israeli censorship on feddit or some ridiculous world mods actions.
- Agreed, some mods are absolutely mental. Like, I recently got a two week ban from a news comm over an unsourced quote. The source of the quote in question?
  The fucking comment I replied to! What, do they expect people to know to quote the user they replied to? I mean, that would require the comm to have posted rules instead of a PTB....
- I guess you mean feddit.org? There's a few feddit instances!
  
  Yes, sorry. The one actively censored by genocide defenders.
This is really hilarious but also thanks for sharing all the instances to steer clear of lol
To me the "joke" wasn't even that funny, more like middle school snark. The whole thing seems like an extreme overreaction.
- In my Lemmy?? No fucking way!
Anyone who mods more than one community should automatically get their account deleted and IP blacklisted, especially if it's across instances.
This is supposed to not be reddit.
- I don’t have a problem with modding multiple communities, because some people simply have the time and patience for it while others don’t. But there should 100% be reasonable limits. Maybe a cap of 3 or 5 communities, and sweeping bans in multiple communities should automatically trigger a manual review from other mods.
  
  Nah, lemmy is way less intensive work on the mod side of things still. Most communities, you'll go weeks without needing to do anything at all.
  This community here has a bias towards high traffic communities. The more traffic you get, the more reports you get, the more chances of someone doing stupid stuff that needs mod action. And, with a higher volume of mod actions, there's a higher chance of even the most level headed mods fucking up in one was or another.
  Most of lemmy, one person could moderate a hundred communities and you'd never know that they were there at all.
Well, since it seems it was done in error, I suppose the issue is at an end. I would have said PTB though.
I will still say that preemptive bans are a valid tool. They have to be applied surgically to prevent problems, but there absolutely are multiple reasons to ban someone from a community they haven't yet interacted with.
I'm not sure this one meets the standard though. Even if you had made the comment, or a similar one, seriously, I'm not sure I can see how that would make you likely to go trolling on a vegan community.
Shit, I have actively taken the piss out of the asshole segment of the vegan population, and I don't go to vegan communities and pull that bull. So I can't see why a single comment would be enough of an indicator of future risk. And that's when preemptive bans are a valid tool, when someone is saying or doing something that shows they'll have a high probability of going to a community and cause problems. Not just because they hold a different opinion (no matter how wrong that opinion may or may not be).
Which, despite it being resolved, that is why I would have said PTB to begin with.
However, I'll also say that Sunshine is really easy to get along with normally. Everyone has bad days and makes bad decisions sometimes, and I think that's the case here. An otherwise very sweet person fucking up in a way that's not the norm.
- I will still say that preemptive bans are a valid tool.
  No, unless you are talking about spam bots etc.
  
  I respect that opinion, but I've seen too many cases where communities het as swamped by assholes that had a long standing pattern of being assholes. Not just reddit and lemmy as far as that goes, this stretches back to the nineties on forums and chat rooms.
  You can predict future behavior based on past behavior.
  Use the Nazi bar example. The bouncer sees this dude walking around the neighborhood with swastikas on, it doesn't matter if the asshole is wearing a suit and pays the cover charge when he tries to come in, he's still not going to be a customer you want.
  If I go around trolling vegans, and the mod of a vegan sub bans me only from their vegan sub, that's legit. If I run around throwing slurs, and I get banned from communities for the groups I used slurs towards, fuck me, I deserve the bans. When it comes to bigotry in specific, I'd deserve to be banned everywhere.
  But it does need to be surgical, and appropriate to the degree of douchebaggery involved.
  As a tool, refusing to let people into a community/forum that will absolutely contribute nothing is a useful tool.
Don't respect lemmy mods or their decisions.
But it isn't a given. Drowning is supposed to be one of the least painful ways die. Which is taking a animal adapted to breath arit and putting them in water.
- Least painful? According to what?
  
  The people who drowned, of course! They look so peaceful.

210 comments