This is good, this is what any server open with automatic sign-ups should do. They've had a serious problem of new accounts spamming hateful shit in DMs and attacking people. I've been harassed and doxxed by troll accounts from there and I'm glad they're doing something about it.
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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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.
- Keep the comments in YPTB posts about the moderation action itself, not about the general topic in which the moderation took place.
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.
YPTB 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.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- 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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At first, I was against this. Then I thought some more about it, and now I’m fine with it.
Back in the good ole days when I was the most hated person on Lemmy (you didn’t bully me off, and I'm still gonna vote 3rd party, haha), there were a lot of brand-new accounts whose only posts were about me. A system like this would have stopped a lot of that.
Harassment is a real problem on Lemmy. Some people get sooooooo mad over a disagreement, that they think it’s reasonable to create 10 new accounts just to keep attacking someone. It’s weird.
People have aggressively harassed me for being trans and having AI communities. Most of them were brand new accounts from open signup instances like Programming.dev. Instances creating tooling to stop bad actors from easily creating burner accounts to harass others is a good thing.
If people don't like that, registration applications and intent monitoring of your instance is and always has been an option.
Yeah, the AI hate on Lemmy is ridiculous. For a platform full of tech people who supposedly love innovation and open source, the knee-jerk hostility toward actual technological progress is pretty fucking weird.
I generally don't particularly see anything wrong with this. Spam and harassment is a weak point on lemmy and we're all just coasting on good faith that dedicated actors won't abuse it. Having tools to detect harassing isn't a bad thing, especially when they mention the exact cases they're trying to handle. At the end of the day, you need to decide if you trust your admins to handle this appropriately. If you don't, then you can always switch servers or open your own.
Just letting you know that this post has been significantly altered from what it was when I posted this.
Now it looks like this mostly a PR issue where their basement nerd accidentally was allowed to do customer support for a brief second.
I welcome all ideas to curb abuse but reading DMs seems a bit much. I figure users can report abusive DMs, which could then be viewed instead of looking at them before hand?
That being said, I find it hard to think of new users sending legitimate DMs. I have done it once I think during my entire time on Lemmy.
I'll copy the answer I provided in the main thread over on !meta@programming.dev, but to also add, the tool does not monitor all users. It only monitors newly created user accounts on programming.dev for x amount of time so that we know that the account isn't being made to abuse or spam. We do not want to have this tool monitoring regular users.
Copied reply about why DM monitoring is needed:
From the PR standpoint, I don't think it's worth it, and it'd be better to just leave it on reports.
The problem is that we can't rely on reports of DMs since lemmy doesn't federate them to us.
E.g.
-> troll@programming.dev makes a new account and sends harassment to victim@lemmy.instance
-> victim@lemmy.instance reports the DMs from troll@programming.dev
-> We, the admins of programming.dev, do not see this report because lemmy does not federate the DM report and troll@programming.dev can continue harassing others because we never find out about it.This isn't just a theoretical, it happened just last month that one of our users (1 day old account) sent rape and death threats (which were reported), and we found out about it by pure chance when talking to admins from the other instance.
And just to clarify, the tool only automatically monitors new accounts, i.e. accounts that are being registered today. If you account is more than a few weeks old, the tool doesn't monitor any of your activity.
Ohhh, I see the problem with the non-federating reports. That does make these measures much more understandable, although it sounds like it's not receiving the reports that needs fixing overall.
It's an open issue on github from 2024, it doesn't seem to be a priority. This tool allows us to react faster than reports though, and hopefully remove some problematic content before it's seen by others.
It's not power tripping, as you said in a comment.
But it is bullshit, and they can fuck right off with the "too much detail, done locally" shit.
Look, I'm all for auto mod tools. I've been vocal about it being why I would never mod a large community on the fediverse. There's just too much assholery online to not have a tool that filters out the assholes before anyone else is exposed to it.
But, with reddit, anyone could look at the documentation on what auto mod could do. You knew, if you wanted, what was an wasn't possible. You could easily figure out why your comment or post ran afoul of it. Despite the complaints aboue its misuse, it was the thing that made modding a subreddit halfway bearable. And, when used appropriately, it made being part of a sub a much better experience.
But this? The lack of transparency about what's going on, what the tool does, how it does it, just ain't cool. It flies in the face of what the fediverse is supposed to be.
It's llm/ai surveillance without even source available access so a given user can decide to opt the fuck out.
Like I said, a tool like that is a good thing, not a bad one. But not being open is abhorrent for this use.
Edit: for any stragglers, do read the responses made by people from the instance in question before raising any hell. They seem to be on board with providing good info to possible new users and informing current users that might object.
Theres no LLM involved. This version of the post doesnt have the tldr to clarify some things so ill just repost my comment here
- Were not sending data to an LLM but the method is hidden so bad actors cant bypass it (you can disagree on that but the main issue is bots that are able to check blacklisted content and then just edit messages slightly to bypass it)
- The things that are checked are public (posts, comments, and dms that are also sent to other servers we dont control) and can be moderated on regardless of this. There isnt anything that breaches privacy
- Worst thing it can automatically do is temporarily remove a post/comment until an admin can approve or deny it just so its not there for people to run into (for example if someone spams slurs at someone else the someone else doesnt see that instead of it being there until an admin is able to come online)
Aight, that's a great response :)
What I'm taking away from that is that the method is more like what auto mod on reddit did than a separate piece of software running. That, as such, it's something admins have full control over beyond just choosing to have it in place or not; as in an llm would be a closed box with limited ability to influence what goes on inside. And that it's serving pretty much as a filter as opposed to an automated decision maker.
Which is exactly what the fediverse needs tbh, assuming I'm understanding what's being used correctly.
With that assumption in place, my only remaining "bullshit" is in a little more transparency on exactly what it is. Not the details of keywords and such that would allow bots to easily bypass, but as in whether it's some kind of custom built code y'all have put together, vs an externally sourced program. If it's external, then it should definitely be made known where it comes from so that prospective users can make a decision based on that.
yeah pretty much exactly that. It's custom built 100% by our team with no external tools or anything (just a way to notify us using apis). it's technically a separate running code since we can't hook it into the base lemmy code that easily but acts the same way
Not strictly ptb, but just didn’t expect to see something like this anywhere on Lemmy.
We don't have much of a choice.
Not because of real users, but bots. We've seen a huge influx of bots lately, to the point different instances have different solutions.
I know of one instance that is planning on removing all comments and posts of users that delete within a week of being created, as there is a group with an agenda doing this.
Well, auto-remove feature looks like a bit too much for me, especially with no clear write-up on rules it follows - getting unexpected automated false positive bans often sucks a lot emotionally; good thing you've announced it at least.
I have an opinion (just a personal vision on the big picture, I have no desire to instill it in others) that whenever we start needing automated tools like these in Fediverse, it's a sign that decentralization concept starts failing locally and it's time to federate more: make more servers with smaller governance.
I personally think new user monitoring is bad.
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