Respectfully, I believe this incident serves more as a learning opportunity for the admin team rather than a reason to amend the rules.

This isn’t the first time I’ve observed Rooki acting inappropriately for an admin of a community. As an admin of a (admittedly much smaller) corner of the internet, I’ve learned to interact with users in a way that is polite and ensures they feel safe and heard. This is at least the second instance where I’ve seen Rooki respond emotionally and rather adversarially towards users, which has, in my view, undermined their credibility, to the point that I hope to avoid future interactions with them.

I understand that managing LW, one of the largest and general-purpose instances, especially with Lemmy’s still rather limited moderation tools, is challenging, and I appreciate the hard work all of you, including Rooki, put into maintaining it and making it run as smoothly as it does. I’m NOT asking for their removal; however, considering that this is not the first time I’ve seen Rooki behave uncivilly and antagonistically towards users, I hope that this will be a formative experience for them.

(Edit for clarity)

It’s great that the admins are putting so much effort into getting this right.

Sadly, I don’t think this is the way. Adding this to the ToS means you admins will always be in the centre of every unwinnable situation that arises.

You need a committee to deal with these issues on a case by case basis. There are many advantages to this:

• You can be tough but flexible and adaptive
• you can enlist the help of people with more time
• you can enlist the help of people with experience writing policies
• committee members can resign or be discontinued when they become embroiled in some shit storm.
• you can retain veto power

I don’t want to be critical of the ToS because someone has put a lot of thought into it, but the most charitable thing I can say is that its unlikely to serve its intended purpose.

Walk into a vet office and tell them you want your cat to eat a vegan diet and watch their eyes roll at the speed of sound out of their skull

Any chance the relevant incident could be unpacked and used as a demonstration of how these changes would alter the outcome or encourage a different outcome?

As someone who only saw pieces of it after the fact, I am potentially in the dark here about the purposes and context of these changes.

That being said, from what I did see, it seemed very much like an instance admin imposing themselves and their superior power on a community when there were probably plenty of other more subtle action that could have been taken, where subtlety becomes vital for any issue complex and nuanced enough to be handled remotely well. I’m not sure I’m seeing any awareness of this in this post and the links provided.

For instance, AFAICT, the “incident” involved a discussion of if or how a domestic cat could eat a vegan diet. Obviously that’s not trivial as they, like humans, have some necessary nutrients, and AFAICT the vegans involved were talking about how it could be done, while the admin involved was basically having none of that and removed content on the basis that it would lead to a cat dying.

And then in the misinformation link we have:

We also reserve the right to remove any sufficiently scientifically proven MALICIOUS information posted which a user may follow, which would result in either IMMINENT PHYSICAL harm to an INDIVIDUALS PROPERTY, the PROPERTY of OTHERS or OTHER LIVING BEINGS.

In the context of cats and their food … which “living beings” are being harmed and who is encouraging or discouraging this harm?

Whether you’re vegan or not, this seems to me formally ambiguous and on the face of it only enshrines the source of the conflict rather than facilitating better forms of communication or resolution (perhaps there are things in the by-laws I’ve missed??).

Two groups can have exactly the same aim and core values (reduce harm to living beings) but in the complexity of the issue come to issue a bunch of friendly fire … that’s how complex issues work.

So, back to my original question … how exactly would things be done better?

The biggest issue with Reddit and Facebook was that they let stuff like this stick around it and eventually consume it.

It’s a good policy imho, and I’m happy to see it

Science should prevail

It’s not the same thing, but IMO the best things the admins can do is establish a runbook of sorts of how to deal with these situations - because they’re not out of the realms of possibility.

Where I disagree with some is in the rules needing to be black and white. There are instances, say for example a self-harming support group or a community that deals with conditions with no medical cure. IMO this is where nuance is key, because people will share misinformation or procedures that could cause harm/illness. This is where a case by case basis is needed, and ultimately the “path of least harm” is where this will excel. Regardless, admins and mods should contribute to these runbooks for their case, so that there is an established plan that is transparent to all.

Not my instance, but after perusing those links, what’s the point? “Generally” this, “generally” that, paired with vague obligations. Doesn’t matter a bit if you have an actual problem with a member of the administration time and the rest buddy up and play silent.

Let me ask you this, you’ve been up for quite a while, you’ve had staff rollovers, you must have had issues with at least one of your admins. Have you been transparent about them and reached out to anyone who might have been affected by them and publicly apologized and addressed any actions on their behalf, or have you played coy and just ignored them and kept quiet about them, releasing at best only excuses that have kept any internal drama hidden lest they affect the donation/income streams?

Not really launching any accusations, but actions speak louder than words. Look at Reddit, it has a decent community guideline, and it means shit except whitewashing when it comes to actual enforcement.

And now the incident’s “debate” is here.

There’s a fine line between misinformation and “subjectively offensive information”. To me, this seems like it was a pretty clear case of abuse of power regardless of where you stand on the original issue and retroactively changing the rules to excuse that abuse does not bode well for this community.

Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.

Even in shitpost/meme communities?

I understand this intended mainly toward health and news communities but as a site rule there might need an exception for other type of communities.

Don’t these rules make communities about BBQ or cooking meat in general against the rules? BBQ does put “any living being in imminent danger”.

What a mess. Thank you mods and admins for doing the work.

Oh my drama.

This is why I left .world in the first place, and that was even when their censorship was understandable. That’s the beauty of Lemmy.

“We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.”

Does this mean it’s against the rules to promote keto, paleo, and carnivore diets? All of these cause a great deal of harm.