Here’s my experience on the fediverse: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit

If you are trying to access it like me now, you might get an Error 50x, but no matter since I can resume it with far more reliable Internet WayBack Machine links.

With my user InternetTubes@lemmy.world, I made the last comment you see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@InternetTubes@lemmy.world inside a thread that still ends with “mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.”

As a result, one of the admins purged and banned my account, removing months of comments and participation, not to mention any credibility I would have when pointing out the claims had I not been able to store them in IWB: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog

The most recent lemmy.world modlog has even been purged of all mentions of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog (Search for HEISENBERG and search back up to see the huge gap). The way they acted with my account gives me the impressions that claims from other users who say they were moderators with them are true: https://lemmy.ml/comment/5060380

I’ve submitted a ticket, whose link leads to a service hosted on mastodon.world, and have received no reply: https://imgur.com/a/aisRzL9

My suggestions:

There needs to be remediation and resilience against bad faith moderation and instances within the fediverse system, otherwise there will be people who take advantage of it. My original comment has criticisms regarding permanent bans as well.

The fediverse could benefit from having a way to migrate accounts if you run into problems with an instance that wouldn’t be considered a problem in another instance, to safeguard your submission history.

Modlogs are good but worthless when they can be manipulated, and the fediverse might do well to consider ways to implement decentralized tracking of them to monitor attempts to alter them.

Still, just because an experiment doesn’t have the ideal results doesn’t mean it doesn’t get us closer. Unfortunately, if people are going to trust the server with the best marketing instead looking into issues like this, it pretty much makes it impossible to move on because bad faith actors who are best at lying and cutthroat tactics will be the ones to prevail over people questioning what you are telling them without reading the mountains of evidence you are using to back your claims.

The rot definitely seems too close to the core with lemmy.

I’m not sure what’s up, but entries have certainly been removed. This was then: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog

This was a more recent IWM archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog

Search for “HEISENBERG” in both and then read back through to the most recent to get an idea of how different they are. Some bans are showing up, some aren’t, a lot of them aren’t even there.

I’m no expert, but modlog isn’t exactly the same across all instances. I think actions like a user getting banned in their home instance do get propagated to the other modlogs, since my ban got propagated to lemmy.ml’s moglog, but this user’s ban in lemmy.world wasn’t.

I haven’t touched the lemmy code, but seeing what’s mentioned over at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2349 , the modlog seems to be just a combination of database tables that are normally maintained server side but, just like in any other database, can be edited manually.

Only trust the modlog as much as you trust the server you are reading it on.

Yeah, I’m really getting the feeling they are just trying to bury it and ignore it. I was having trouble accessing the modlog, but when I was able to, they seemed to have gone through the effort to eliminate a lot of the entries, which included my account purge, ban, and ban reason. They still haven’t even bothered to answer the ticket I put up on tickets.mastodon.world, maybe I’ll add a screenshot to that later to show the ticket status and the time it has spent as unanswered. No admin has replied to me directly, and the closest I’ve seen any admin reply on the issue is to criticize the kbin.social instance as reliable because of the criticism they get on them.

The real problem is this is being done in bad faith, and if that’s their core drive, then the only thing they’ll do in the future is make-up better sounding excuses to cover their asses.

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.

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

I don’t think this is exactly right, but I was overthinking it. I just saw that the user InternetTubes at lemmy.world got banned on both instances but InternetTubes at kbin.social has only been banned from lemmy.world, and just thought it hinted that an admin manually banned me across both instances the first time and forgot about this user the second time. Yet what’s probably happening is that when a user is banned on the instance hosting the account, it gets automatically propagated across instances.

Lemmy’s developers run lemmy.ml, and incidentally, I just looked at their modlog and found this:

Banned @InternetTubes
reason: disagreeing with the Terms of Service - don’t worry your content is gone

at the same time it appeared on lemmy.world’s modlog. At the very least, it seems to hint its the same admin and that they went through the effort to attempt to ban it on both instances.

Seriously, this is the least of its problems, but it certainly hints at them: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit

Basically, they don’t even follow the examples they set in their Terms of Service and will not only ban but purge your entire comment account on a whim because they didn’t like the criticism they said they were open to on a post stating that “users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World.” There’s no doubt, they were pretty clear they considered the criticism “disagreeing with the terms of service”.

Create your user on another instance and save yourself the surprise of encountering admins who abuse their power on a whim. That can be your entire account history down the drain, and the number of comments or the age of the account won’t matter to them.

They don’t suck ass, only the power hungry abusers with power over your account do. It’s certainly an indication that perhaps how these social networks are designed should be reconsidered instead of just trying to create carbon copies of flawed systems.

Incidentally though, even though lemmy.world has banned my account here now, I can still comment on their threads and participate in them, it’s just that it will really only be visible to kbin users. Not sure if that implies I’m also essentially invulnerable from their community’s moderation, at least in regards to kbin,social users, it probably should be something that should be looked at. It stopped working, so I guess it was a sync issue, and would explain why I was still able to access my user history through here to back it up onto the Internet Wayback Machine.

Their team is more than one person, so I’m trying to see if I can get a reply from their email in case I can get a more reasonable answer. I have little hope of it, they seem to be a pretty small team (relatively speaking) and I get the impression it was the same person who wrote the Terms of Service.

Funnily enough, another user who was actually being rude in the same thread got banned a few hours earlier but had his comment history as well as the taunts he made in the thread left untouched, showing much more willingness on their part to maintain and even drop down to that level of discourse. I’m not even sure why they are bothering with a Terms of Service if they are just winging it and don’t even care about maintaining appearance.

I’ll tell you what will make it unsustainable, getting banned “disagreeing” for criticizing and questioning the Terms of Service: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit

I was going to reply, but lemmy.world admins decided to ban my account there suddenly and delete my complete comment history because of some criticism to their terms of conduct (hence why the comment you replied to is empty in some instances)… luckily I noticed as I was about to respond to your reply, saving it in the process when it didn’t seem to go through. Without further adeu, and keeping in mind that I am not a legal expert:

That’s true for cookies, but I’m not so sure it is true for this. I could be completely wrong, so I’ve tried searching for more answers, and from what I’ve gathered, it’s not even something that all EU states agree with. According to EDPB Guidelines there is something known as “permissible consent”. What you are referring to is discussed in this point:

In order for consent to be freely given, access to services and functionalities must not be made
conditional on the consent of a user to the storing of information, or gaining of access to information
already stored, in the terminal equipment of a user (so called cookie walls)

But when you are talking about ads, you aren’t just talking about information stored or access to it, you are talking about a commercial transaction, between the person paying the service to put up the ad so that someone views it, who in essence is paying a part of your subscription. This can still exist even when you’ve refused targeted marketing, so only permissible incentive (seeing ads that may be more relevant to you) is lost in that regard, meaning you still have a genuine choice. But I’m no expert if that’s how the law applies.

It really gets nebulous, and I’m not seeing a clear answer in the EDPB guidelines, but it does say this in one of the examples it gives:

As long as there is a possibility to have the contract performed or the contracted service delivered by this controller without consenting to the other or additional data use in question, this means there is no longer a conditional service. However, both services need to be genuinely equivalent.

The only obligation on behalf of YT might be that the user is aware of and agrees to the contract and the collection of personal data, “accessing information already stored on an end user’s terminal equipment” for the purpose of fulfilling contractual obligations.

In short, it’s not that cut and dry. It’s the reason why you can’t access Netflix without paying. It’s the reason you have a cheaper Netflix service if you accept ads.

Well, considering they just decided to ban my account and delete all of my content on their server without even a warning for simply criticizing their terms of conduct, I guess you were right and I was an idiot for defending them.

As a dick who makes wild claims yet provides no evidence of them?

You say a lot of things, but do you have evidence of them? Or is it just related to them doing what’s actually required to avoid giving the people DDoSing them another means of taking them down, fake DMCAs based on communities hosted in other instances that promote breaking the law?

And before anyone gets any idea, if they tried doing the same because they are mad, expect for it to backfire. Spectacularly. As in you might want to think of moving directly into the servers hosting those communities. And that’s not a threat, that’s because anyone with a brain can read, specially those in the legal world who have jobs because there is literally a separate aspect of legal proceedings involved collecting evidence called discovery where lots of people with brains are able to read and understand the same conversations you and me are able to understand for instances that might indicate aiding, abetting, and collusion and discern them from the false accusations thereof.

I mean, I’m noticing the same thing between kbin.social and lemmy.world. There was a post I wanted to see through kbin.social from lemmy.world and couldn’t.