this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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AskBeehaw
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What's wrong with vandalism?
(My instance supports anarchists.)
My hypothetical bot army just down voted all your comments below the threshold, all your comments are deleted now.
You don't have a problem with that?
This is a good example. Most spaces, (virtually all spaces) will consider that a form of vandalism. A similar but even more extreme example is a spam bot posting thousands of links to scam websites.
Some might be fine with that, and that's up to each community. Some security honeypot-style communities probably benefit from allowing spam, for example.
Not really. I don't need validation.
And I think that should be part of it. No numbers available for end users(admins would be able to, but ultimately the points wouldn't matter beyond the threshold you set). Comments without numbers. Let the algo sort it out. Organic conversations without measure.
Sounds healthy almost.
What part of getting silenced by a bot army is organic?
My hypothetical bot army down voted your comments again, If you don't need validation, you'll have no issue deleting your comments?
And the "admins would be able to" is just moderation by a different name. Moderators exist because admins can't do everything and the work needs to be spread out.
It's your bot army. And you're organic.
Waves arms around gesticulating wildly.
I was onboard with the idea as an experiment, until you mentioned admins. Mods are just unpaid admins. If you introduce a hierarchical class of users that can do more than others, it's no longer the 'organic' internet interaction you're selling it as.
I think that's also an important distinction:
are not the same thing. The Internet includes a lot of non-individual, non-human, and non-social actors, in a way that real life doesn't: companies don't send people to insert themselves into your meetups at the library, but they do send 'representatives' into Internet spaces. If you try to replicate the social anarchism of small group meetups on the internet, you will not get an authentic experience.
https://youtu.be/O_v43wbJWGQ
Vandalism != anarchism
From an anarchist perspective: there's a difference between vandalizing a Walmart and vandalizing an online forum. Anarchists clearly recognize that vandalism is destructive. And destruction absolutely can be a liberatory act, e.g. vandalizing a Walmart. But if we're trying to construct a liberatory community connected by social media ... clearly, vandalism of said community is counterproductive.
Moderation allows trusted members of the community to take action against people trying to wreck our communities. It is an act which asserts our freedom of association in any case, a corollary of which is our freedom to disassociate, and an act of community defense in extreme cases (e.g. yeeting Nazis to Hell). That is not to say that forum moderation, including Lemmy's and PieFed's implementations, is beyond critique or is incapable of reproducing existing hierarchies. But IMO, moderation can be a perfectly valid tool in an anarchist toolkit.
Not to be really boring, but it doesn't take too much "vandalism" (specifically talking about forum vandalism) to make an internet space more hostile than friendly
Vandalism in the common definition is something considered destructive to the space by owners of that space. If the community who owns it wants it, it's not vandalism in that community.