I was gonna go try to feel righteously validated for a pet peeve of mine over at Unpopular Opinion, but it’s closed. Then I saw this post and it describes some concerns with moderation policies, but the link it references has a bunch of crossed-out text, and I was just wondering if someone is willing to write out the detailed explanation of what happened and what the controversy is.
I’m not entirely familiar with the controversy, but from your link it appears that the Lemmy.world admin team announced a moderation policy that didn’t go over too well and now they’re reconsidering.
When someone runs a Lemmy instance, they are the administrators of the instance and have full control over everything that happens on it. By default, users can create accounts and communities on the instance. The user that creates a community is the moderator of that community and can control what gets posted within it. There’s an overlap of authority between the instance admin and the community mod, as they both have the ability to decide what content gets posted, and sometimes that creates issues.
The issue here seems to be that the Lemmy.world admin team doesn’t want community mods “creating narratives” by removing posts they do not agree with. In their rescinded announcement, they give an example that if a user makes a post in a community about how the Earth is flat, the community mod shouldn’t be allowed to remove it. Instead, the community must respond to the post with debate or downvotes. Mods who remove these posts, instead of allowing debate, would be in violation of the instance admin policy and would be stripped of their moderation powers by the admins. The moderator of [email protected] (and some other community mods) blocked new posts to their community as a protest to the admin decision (which is now on hold).