Rimu published yet another hit piece against the /0 instance and this time posted it in his own instance comms as well. One of his mods jumped in, admitted they don't know anything about anything, but nevertheless felt confident enough to state their opinion as fact and in the process insult all of us collectively, then stickied his opinion for good measure.
So I decided to reply sarcastically, at which point that mod insulted me and locked the thread, which is apparently a feature in piefed which simply hides/deletes further replies in that thread, but since it's not a feature in lemmy, it appears to function like a shadow delete.
This is what my last reply would have been.
(Yes I'm being snarky, but that "I'm so mature" bullshit just rubs me the wrong way.)
In my opinion, using mod powers to get the last insult in, is just bastard behaviour.
My claim was that piefed development and instantiation could be influenced by state actors. If it wasn't clear from my other response, I believe such a thing is possible because the state (specifically the United States of America via it's clandestine spy agencies) has been documented as having done so before. Other countries, like China, Russia, and Isreal (and the USA) have all also been credibly accused of shaping public discourse with paid actors, bots, and various other accusations that get tossed around regularly. Creating chaos, destroying the ability to perceive any piece of information as being true or real, these are the goals of numerous agencies and actors.
Rimu can just be an ideological patsy, they don't have to be "in on it" if their behavior aligns with authoritarian goals naturally. That's the basis of modern decentralized fascism: stochastic terror, disinformation, layers of control mediated by regulation and economics to isolate the decision makers from the soldiers.
I don't need to imagine a "cabal" when an open conspiracy of pedophile billionaires demonstrably rules the planet. The subtle shifting you made in my argument from those implied authoritarians to the language of "cabal" seeks to associate my argument with a fascist dog whistle for the secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. It's the same as if you'd claimed I was implying that Rimu is a "globalist." Those words mean more than just their definitions taken from the first paragraph of Wikipedia.
Everyone might be a state actor or ideological patsy ushering in fascism on this glorious day!