this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile On Grad
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It was established 2 years ago, before the concerns for .world becoming so big started really cropping up
Plus, there's really nothing wrong with .world having some big comms, the real issue is them having the bulk of the big comms
Some people take exception to the overall moderation, although from what I had seen from that drama is that most people just didn't like FlyingSquid. Who hasn't been around for months, now.
The problem with FlyingSquid was that he would sometimes get upset arguing with people about politics, and there was a really loud contingent that was convinced that was the worst thing in the world and he was a power tripper who was going to break lemmy.world, and get all histrionic about it and make these weird accusations that never seemed to pan out to anything more than "he got in an argument."
The issue, to me, with lemmy.world is that there's a contingent of mods that like to make explicit safe spaces for propaganda (UniversalMonk), or just make baffling decisions that all of the users hate (UniversalMonk). The ones who are making most of the really terrible decisions aren't really well-known names like FlyingSquid or JordanLund or anything, they're just kind of behind the scenes poking at mod controls instead of commenting. I don't really know what they're up to now, but before the election they were spending significant effort actively making big communities on lemmy.world worse (like letting UniversalMonk bait people into arguments and then banning people he got in arguments with).
To me it's very notable that FlyingSquid actually did (in addition to whatever misdemeanors he committed) actually spend time trying to eliminate propaganda and dickheadedness from the communities he moderated, and I think it's interesting the overlap between that and the loud contingent of users demanding at all times that he be removed at all costs. A lot of the time if you look at one of his embittered arguments that's being used as evidence that he was the worst person in the world, he is arguing with someone who is being transphobic or conservative or otherwise just kind of a dickhead, and for some reason he would decide that the right reaction is to get in a heated argument with them. But it wasn't like someone would come in "I like raccoons" and he would say "WELL I LIKE LLAMAS SO FUCK YOU (BAN)," it was usually something pretty significant. Anyway, that loud contingent of users did have some success in creating a narrative that "I heard FlyingSquid is power tripping / terrible person / he's a big problem," which to me is sad.
I don't really trust the lemmy.world admin team, but I think most of the complaint about lemmy.world is that their big communities' moderation is on average very very bad. That doesn't really apply to small communities that are run by people passionate about the content that's in them.
That's my 2 cents on it.
FlyingSquid had a nasty tendency of getting into an argument, and then, when faced with any amount of pushback, threaten a ban if they continued arguing with him.
I'm not a saint myself - I'll be the first to admit that I don't really have the temperament for moderation, and I only moderate because of the dual issues of "Lemmy is young, and if I don't create these comms, they're not going to be created for a long time" and "Jesus fucking Christ why are there so many goddamn tankies and campists spreading genocide denial??", but that's exceptionally poor behavior from a mod.