This is inspired by this advice from a few months ago:
Stop giving shitty mods a free pass. Honest mistakes happen; but if the mod in question is assumptive, disingenuous, trigger-happy, or eager to enable certain shitty types of user, spread the word about their comm being poorly moderated. And don’t interact directly with the comm. I think that at least here in the Fediverse we should demand higher standards from our mods.
(Emphasis mine.)
In the past I have used places like !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world or !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone to call out mods on other subs, with mid-to-almost-high degrees of success, but I wonder if it would be better to have a dedicated sublemmy?
Here are my thoughts on what would make this effective:
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .world due to the breadth of possible conflicts of interest with admins
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .ml due to federation hurdles
- mods of the community shouldn’t moderate any other communities of any significant size, in order to make the whole “accountability” thing work
- mods should be willing and able to deal with substantial quantities of garbage posts because there would be a lot of “why won’t c/xyz let me be transphobic/say slurs 😡😡” type submissions which, left unaddressed, would outflood genuine criticism
This is still in conceptual form so I am interested what others think :)
Most large instances have a support community. That seems like the suitable place to raise a moderation issue with specific a community on the instance.
This would be a perfect solution I think, if most major mods and subs weren’t hosted on .world and .ml.
The conflict of interest is real and intense; I have been told directly that certain problematic .world mod activity cannot be addressed because the mods in question are close friends with instance admins.
Thanks for your thoughts :)
Yes, but at the same time, it depends on the instance policy as a whole.
Some instance admins prefer to not interfere with how mods handle their communities (which is also a valid stance, I’m not criticizing it), but that means that in the end it wouldn’t have that much impact. And most of the users wouldn’t probably see the posts in the support community.