In my view as a long-time moderator, the purpose of moderation is conflict resolution and ensuring the sitewide rules are followed. As reported today by !vegan@lemmyworld, moderator Rooki’s vision appears to be that their personal disagreement with someone else’s position takes priority over the rules and is enough to remove comments in a community they don’t moderate, remove its moderators for the comments, and effectively resort to hostile takeover by posting their own comment with an opposing view (archived here) and elevating it for visiblity.

The removed comments relate to vegan cat food. As seen in the modlog, Rooki removed a number of pretty balanced comments explaining that while there are problematic ways to feed cats vegan, if done properly, cats can live on vegan cat food. Though it is a controversial position even among vegans, there is scientific research supporting it, like this review from 2023 or the papers co-authored by professor Andrew Knight. These short videos could also work as a TL;DR of his knowledge on the matter. As noted on Wikipedia, some of the biggest animal advocacy organizations support the notion of vegan cat food, while others do not. Vegan pet food brands, including Ami, Evolution Diet, and Benevo have existed for years and are available throughout the world, clearly not prohibited by law in countries with laws against animal abuse.

To summarize, even if you don’t agree with the position of vegan cat food being feasible, at the very least you have to acknowledge that the matter is not clear-cut. Moreover, there is no rule of lemmy.world that prohibits those types of conversations unless making a huge stretch to claim that it falls under violent content “promoting animal abuse” in the context of “excessive gore” and “dismemberment”.

For the sake of the argument, even if we assume that the truth is fully on Rooki’s side and discussions of vegan cat food is “being a troll and promoting killing pets”, the sitewide rules would have to be updated to reflect this view, and create a dangerous precedent, enabling banning for making positive comments about junk food (killing yourself), being parents who smoke (killing your kids), being religious “because it’s not scientific” and so on. Even reddit wouldn’t go that far, and there are plenty of conversations on vegan cat food on reddit.

Given Rooki’s behavior and that it has already resulted in forcing the vegan community out of lemmy.world and with more likely to follow, I believe the only right course of action is to remove them as a moderator to help restore the community’s trust in the platform and reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    12·
    3 months ago

    This seems to be a situation where an instance admin (not a community moderator) stepped into a community (!vegan@lemmy.world), removed a bunch of “disinformation” comments, and de-modded some moderators who were letting the “disinformation” by. At issue was whether it is safe to feed cats a vegan diet. I did have to look into veganism and pet food to make sense of that. If there is universal agreement among scientists, veterinarians, and non-crazy vegans that any cat put on a vegan diet dies within 3 months, that’s one thing, but the actual situation doesn’t seem that severe. Rooki also seems to use non-standard terminology and incomplete descriptions in communicating their side of the issue.

    Wikipedia’s obligate carnivore section says (emphasis added):

    Obligate or “true” carnivores are those whose diet requires nutrients found only in animal flesh in the wild… All wild felids, including feral domestic cats, require a diet of primarily animal flesh and organs… In captivity or domestic settings, obligate carnivores like cats and crocodiles can in principle get all their required nutrients from processed food made from plant and synthetic sources.[4][5]

    Reference 4 above is a Guardian article titled Cats may get health benefits from vegan diet, study suggests and subtitled “Owners who fed their pet a plant-based diet reported fewer visits to the vet and less medication use”.

    Rooki uses the term “obligatory carnivore” (instead of the usual “obligate”) and omits that the definition describes the diet only of wild animals, not captive ones. So Rooki’s familiarity with this topic seems limited, and yet they use their admin flag to shut down discussion doesn’t fit their opinion. Wikipedia’s eponym for this type of participant is “Randy in Boise.”

    If this were a dispute between !vegan mods then that would be regular mod drama, but this seems to be from outside the community, not good. While Reddit often has bad moderators on large subs, one of its attractions to many users is unless you’re discussing criminal or near-criminal conduct, you can generally start your own sub and moderate it however you want, with the admins staying out of your hair. The times they banned some subs that didn’t reach that level created significant controversy even by non-supporters of those subs. If Lemmy is trying to present itself as an attractive alternative to Reddit, it should also take a light hand with internal community matters.

    Overall I think it is best that instance admins stop interfering with discussions inside communities, unless there are serious conflicts with site policy. Could we imagine lemmy.world defederating another instance because its vegan community had a comment subthread about feeding a plant diet to your cat? Maybe so, but that doesn’t speak well of lemmy.world, imho. Alternatively, if such discussions get shut down on lemmy.world but wouldn’t get a different instance defederated, then lemmy.world stops being the “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use” that it advertises itself as. So it should leave those discussions alone, both on the local instance and on remote ones.

    I won’t weigh in on the request for Rooki’s removal but I’d want Rooki and other admins to step away from this type of action, and I’d want the site poilcy (written or unwritten) to generally embrace this non-interference principle.

    WP:UNINVOLVED is an internal Wikipedia policy about admin actions and as such, doesn’t directly apply here, but it is something to consider in deciding how best to handle these issues.