Due to the recent ban of a wolfballs.com-user for “Bigotry and racism on his main account on Wolfball.” it is requested that Lemmy.ml updates the Code of Conduct to reflect actual moderation. Please consider adding that Lemmy.ml will ban users for comments made with other accounts on other instances.
This is just my opinion:
Inssently promoting an instance that is very explicitly against our rules, is also against our rules. It would be way less of an issue and way more a grey area (IMO) if they weren’t constantly plugging Wolfballs as the main admin and was just posting like most other users, but it’s clear that the only purpose of their Lemmy.ml account is to do that (which could also qualify as blogspam BTW but we’ve let that slide a lot for promoting other instances). If an account is constantly promoting an instance as the head admin of that instance, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take mod actions based on their activity on that instance, because what they’re saying on their account here is essentially that they think their content over there is good, that they endorse it, and want people to keep posting stiff in that vein.
To be clear, it’s okay for an admin on another instance to have an account here, it’s also okay to promote your instance here as long as you don’t cross over into spam territory. But if you do the latter, I don’t think it’s an overstep for us to go over to your instance and check the content you post there, and see if the instance being promoted (indirectly by us as well, since we’re the admins) is consistent with our own rules. This would apply for other platforms, yes. We’re not going to hunt down your YouTube channel and inspect it, but if you promote your YouTube channel and one can immediately find racist/bigoted content there, that is indeed grounds for removal of the post, inssently promoting that channel will get you banned.
There is already precedent for this, mostly related to pornography. Where if you post a site and easily accessible from your link are pornography, especially if what you posted is the homepage, that entire post is considered NSFW and will get removed. Two examples from way back are posts to a fanfiction site and an anime site (not posts to a specific page btw, but advertising the sites in general), and immediately accessible on the sites were tags and links to pages relating to pornography and critically, sexualization of minors. Both were removed as soon as we found out. We didn’t particularly care if the poster agreed with those things or not. They were there, and they’re against our rules.
@coldhotman@nrsk.no, @Salamander@mander.xyz, @sxan@midwest.social
Thank you for taking the time to explain your reasoning despite not owing us an explanation. I suppose one of the “cons” of a transparent modlog is that we only get to see the final output without getting the full picture, making it easy to get the wrong impression.
Good! Thank you for the effort. It is important to set a clear boundary and ban users/communities/instances/… if they attempt to cross it.