I just suddenly found my user over there banned. Not for getting in a fight or breaking any rules, but just for criticizing and asking questions regarding its recent vague Terms of Service. In fact, no reason, warning, or reply was given beforehand, and the admin who did it suddenly scaled to banned, with no reply or anything sent to email.
It seems to be because of some criticism I made regarding https://legal.lemmy.world/, where rather than answer it they deleted my entire user history and implied that the criticism was:
reason: disagreeing with the Terms of Service - don’t worry your content is gone
Note that I never explicitly disagreed with the Terms of Service, but I guess they must consider any criticism of it disagreement.
It hardly matters when they’ve made sure to make it my word versus theirs by eliminating my entire user history. This should be a big hint about how they will treat you, your comment history, and your ongoing discussions, even those unrelated to the ban, and it shows just how shit they will be at transparency when it happens (be sure to use the Internet Wayback Machine on them).
A lot of my criticisms had to do with permabans and how they would carry them out, so I guess I have my answer - in the worst way imaginable it without recourse, control, or even the possibility of getting it lifted.
What they say under 6.2, it’s all deception, “what may happen” when the reality is they won’t mind completely banning you on the spot. They won’t give you a warning and tell you not to repeat it. There won’t be any sort process. They will just ban you and remove your comment history on the spot. They will throw your entire history of content down the drain, and laugh while making a snarky comment. It’s even worse than reddit, then, but that was always a risk, specially given who’s heading Lemmy’s development and given the apparent lack of concrete details regarding its leadership.
I suppose I’ll try kbin.social now. On the off-chance that somebody has of knows of where there could be a cache of the comment I made where they claim I was “disagreeing with the Terms of Service”, I would appreciate it. Oh, never mind, found it - that was easy: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@InternetTubes@lemmy.world
Here’s the link to the modlog removal, because there seem to be a lot of connection problems now and the latest one is missing a lot of admin actions, including those that purged and banned my account:
Then: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog
Now: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog
I’m not sure how it works, because there was a comment on a thread regarding youtube ads that I noticed I couldn’t view after trying to reply to a notification of a kbin.social user comment on it, and I couldn’t get to my comment no matter how hard I tried. Now I can, for some reason, but there’s no comment to reply to!? But it does seem that lemmy.world can at least limit the visibility of my comments to the local kbin.social instance.
But in regards to new users, I just tried to create a user in the lemmy.world instance, and they added a textbox so you had to agree to do so. So I just went and created it in another instance that didn’t force me to agree with the Terms of Service.
To be fair, it’s not a bad idea, they can just finish implementing it by trying to require users agree to it before they can participate in the instance’s community without visibility penalties, so my general view of it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6BYzLIqKB8