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 don’t think the admin who’s to blame is acting like a dictator, they are acting more like a narcissist with a fragile ego who deceive themselves when they do something wrong. A total spez, if you will, whom people should have no doubts about calling out when they put themselves in position of power.
The problem is, they had no problem deleting months and history of comments and because they aren’t willing to recognize what they did wrong or the circumstances that led up to it, it is likely they won’t have a problem going full-on psychotic in the future as well, and that is a very toxic foundation upon which the most popular lemmy instance founded upon. Reddit is proof that it won’t stop the growth or persistence of the platform, but you will get things like the whole Reddit API debacle. People and developers might better spend their time contributing to other instances.