Yesterday I was reading the post about the FUTO keyboard where there were a lot of messages deleted by moderators.
I’ve commented there
What the heck happened with all the messages deleted by moderator?
And it got deleted. Right now you can only see 4, but I’ve counted 19 messages moderated and the post has been locked. Why?
I’ve had a look ad the modlog and the messages don’t seems to violate any policy (now they’ve removed them in the modlog too).
I’m pinging here lemmy.ml admin and the mods of the open source community where the post was posted so they can have their say about it and clarify the situation to me.
@kevincox@lemmy.ml @CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml
@Cloak@lemmy.ml @davel@lemmy.ml @dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml @JoeBidet@lemmy.ml @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml
If I’m getting something wrong, please let me know, I’m here to discus and understand if I’m getting something wrong or if something went wrong in the moderation. Thanks!
Down here you can see the deleted comments.
P.s. I’m writing here because I think that this post on lemmy.ml wouldn’t last long.
I think this would make sense in a Lemmy community that was OpenSourceInitiative who has a very specific set definition. But Open Source as a general idea is fairly open to interpretation. Some people think source-available is open source. I disagree, but that’s just my personal opinion. Now if something was closed source, that’s a very clear distinction.
I’ve seen communities die out over mods enforcing their personal definitions. The Linux subreddit and Lemmy Linux community had issues with this a few years ago where the mod was deleting comments of people talking about what fell outside of their idea that Linux discussion should be FLOSS-only (people discussing closed source apps that ran on Linux, etc).
I think deleting does more harm than good. It’s better for people to discuss when things are a problem so they can understand them better. The Free Software Foundation is way more strict as to their licensing ideas, but even they still discuss and have a page full of alternative licenses where they discuss some are better than others (and even a bad open source license is better than a non-open source license). They don’t ban the mention of conflicting ideas.
Deleting just leaves people confused (and in my case I would have appreciated knowing the issue instead of just seeing a thread full of deleted comments and remaining ignorant). And it does a greater harm because people casually searching on search engines or whatever won’t find any sort of discussion or push back.