This user did hours over a day of violent and transphobic hate speech and was not banned due to absentee admins. And when admins finally take action it’s for “userbase request”?
Uhhhhh? Am I missing something? SDF admins don’t seem to be willing to operate a community as a community of 4k users.
No hate to the admins if they are underpaid or whatever. SDF just needs to appoint reachable and bare minimally invested admins, and if they can’t maybe shouldn’t be running a Lemmy instance; it’s not really a “set it and forget it” deal.
It would be sloppy or negligent. I know they responded and they actually resolved the issue, but they responded late and they don’t seem to actually care. Otherwise they would have indicated that the user broke the rules, not just that the userbase wanted them gone. It also implies that they don’t see what is wrong with Ashton’s hateful posts promoting transphobia and alt-right Nazism, which is concerning just to say the least.
I know that people are going to excuse them for this, on the basis of being a “free service”, which is kind of meaningless because paid services these days are just as bad or worse. So not a good excuse to dissipate criticism. No criticism of their practices is absolutely valid and warranted. Especially because it is a Fediverse service. Therefore even if you don’t use it, it is still your problem that they don’t moderate and don’t care due to federation.
Just to be clear I’m an SDF member and I have been with them for a few years, and I think their intentions are noble, but I also think they tend to not put as much care and effort as they should into some of their services. The fact that it was as difficult as it was to get them to update from a version with broken federation shows that. They need to bring in more active admins, write a list of rules, and maybe most importantly. Come up with a way to keep spammers at bay. I suggested that they require people be Validated SDF members to join the Lemmy as that would basically eliminate all spam or trolling while still allowing it to be accessible for all the people who really want it.
Getting an admin response within hours sounds extremely reasonable to me, TBH. You may want to reconsider your expectations of free services, this is coming across pretty entitled.
I edited the wording to be clearer for those who haven’t been keeping up with recent PTB posts. To clarify, it was over a day.
With that in mind, a day is absolutely a reasonable timeframe for an instance with 4,000 users to expect action—though calling it “entitlement” is a rather skewed perspective. This concerns the safety of a lot of users, who were essentially left unprotected.
If SDF lacks the resources to maintain safety, they should at the very least disable automatic approvals for new users and communities, which, as I understand, had not been done at the time of writing this post. They should consider recruiting volunteer admins and adding Matrix contacts to the instance sidebar for urgent abuse cases like CSAM.
Again, I have no ill will toward the team—I’m simply reporting what happened and what we should hope to see addressed moving forward.
I agree with most of your points, and they should definitely look into getting more active moderators on their instance.
But I’m not sure I understand what you mean by safety?
They took less than 2 days, but the way you word it sounds like someone was going to die because the ‘content’ was up for more than 24 hours?Idk, this whole thing just feels like an over-exaggerated response to something that could have been handled with a simple report.
someone else pointed out that my tone in the original post is a little more pointed than perhaps i intended and i think that is fair.
im really just here to report and keep folks in the loop on the subject.
Fair enough! I guess the tone of your post comes across as more complaining than constructive. Your comments sound a lot different :)
This took over a day. My whole concern was that it was very bad and was making the org behind the instance look horrible.
We spammed all communication channels to wake the admin up. Just a bit ago, the troll activated again with and the admin was ontop of it within the hour
I’m glad they are at least reachable again. I hope they can at least find a handful of admin volunteers to cover user safety concerns across time zones. That should absolutely be possible out of 4,000 users but definitely needs to be done.
Honestly makes me proud of my instance which has 500 users but 4 admins, all of whom respond often within the hour!
Lemmy.cafe is nice
The opposite of power tripping would be negligence.
The ban message is sloppy, and the time to take action was too long, but the actions (ban + removal of comm) were the right call. They probably need more admins, specially to cover hours that others can’t.
What?
Are any of the instance admins anywhere paid? It’s not the norm for sure. Who would be paying them?
SDF admins are paid through the non-profit. So are most in a similar way on larger instances.
Let’s not pickup the pitchforks based on just the ban string. However I agree that the situation where the admins are absent is very suboptimal. They need to assign some people from their instance that are active and ready to respond.
PS: The opposite would be “They deserved it”.
not here for pitchforks, just want what’s best for all their users :)
I am more than willing to do this. I really love the culture we have on SDF. Problem is that they are sysadmins, not instance admins.
Exactly. I’m primarily a sysadmin as well, but first of all I “dogfood” my own lemmy constantly, (i.e. I didn’t set it up just for others) and second first thing I did is onboard more admins to help.
What’s the problem with that reason? It’s better to ban the troll fast that to check and evaluate the (hundred) reports pending.
Also, all my support to the sdf admins. I can’t understand all this pressing against the non bigger instances, they are doing free work for all of us.
Checking just one, or the user account itself, would be sufficient.
