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

NOTE: Apparently it is still there, it just has to be searched for through a more precise filter. It isn’t clear how or why it gets removed. However, it is now clear who performed the ban, and it is the person I suspected: https://web.archive.org/web/20231104183117/https://sh.itjust.works/comment/5112860 Plus it seems the two most active admins are very close: https://web.archive.org/web/20231105083850/https://kbin.social/m/trees@lemmy.world/t/567901/Sipping-mist-from-a-bag-to-get-high-feels-so#entry-comment-3163448

I’ve submitted a ticket, whose link leads to a service hosted on mastodon.world: https://imgur.com/a/aisRzL9

The result? Closed without a reply: https://imgur.com/a/6PK1elq

NOTE: I was finally able to contact Ruud, contact as in get him to join the same Matrix PM chat as me and direct him to this post, but that was basically it. Complete silence and not even a courtesy “I will look into it”, so within their bubble of narcissism. I’m going to guess he’s already quite aware and ok with the “sweep under the rug” approach. In contrast, they were quite quick to ban me from the Matrix chat after joining and waving hello, yet not so quick to provide a reason except that of a circlejerked “yeah just ignore, because look at all the other dirt on the carpet”.

Lemmy.world seems to be corrupt at the core, at it will likely continue to fool a lot of people for years to come.

As of today, two months later, no apology from lemmy.world, my kbin.social account still remains banned. Even though they’ve removed the admin responsible there’s no apology and you wouldn’t know about it or even begin to guess why if you didn’t look under the covers ( https://i.imgur.com/En7roiG.png ), because the other admins are complicit in sweeping it under for the appearance of acting legitimately that they wouldn’t ever dare an apology from the hole they’ve dug themselves into.

  • Ignacio@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I had suspicions about lemmy.world since it started to become a big player inside of lemmy. Now those suspicions became real. That, and the fact that an instance with the domain .world is more US than world. Thanks for the info.

    • InternetTubes@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, this pretty much wasn’t an accident, they just also banned this user, one I had created long before the ban, because of:

      reason: Ban evasion

      While having no problem doing that, what they haven’t done is replied directly or addressed the ticket I sent them, so any benefit of the doubt is pretty much extinguished on my side.

      It’s clear to me they want to sweep it under the rugs on the hope that controlling the narratives on the most popular lemmy instance works out for them. This was probably what they intended by purging my account all along, thankfully they didn’t seem to keep in mind the nuances of the fediverse which has still allowed me to keep evidence and my user account history despite their worst instincts.

    • InternetTubes@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • amio@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Yeah, they seem to be dialing up the internet dictatorship. Shame, because it’s always been one of the only instances with any “general” (non niche and non-geographical) activity to speak of.

    • InternetTubes@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Curious Canid@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    There are plenty of other instances out there with different policies and different approaches to moderation. I live in the US, but I use lemmy.ca. Their writeups said that it is not restricted to Canadians. My experiences here have all been positive. Very nice people.

  • IzzyData@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    At this point Lemmy feels like a failed experiment. I really wanted to like it, but when the admins of the biggest instance are this terrible I don’t know how it can recover.

    Also 90% of the engagement and content is around non-original memes. There is nothing on Lemmy that isn’t somewhere else which means there is no reason to join Lemmy as of yet.

  • minnieo@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    the good thing about decentralized social media is that, if an admin one one instance is being a dick, you can move to another. imagine if that admin ran every single instance? in the way that reddit has one ruler. thankfully, it’s not like that here.

    • InternetTubes@kbin.socialOP
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      10 months ago

      Doesn’t matter if everyone crowds around the largest communities and the admins have complete access and view control over them, at least for what I’m looking for.

    • ntzm [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      Wut, what does lemmy.world have to do with the developers of Lemmy?

      • InternetTubes@kbin.socialOP
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Ech@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          That would be because it’s the same mod action. The modlog is visible from every instance. I’m on lemm.ee and I see the same thing.

          • InternetTubes@kbin.socialOP
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            1 year ago

            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.

  • abff08f4813c@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Hey OP, are you covered by the GDPR or CCPA?

    If so perhaps you could ask for a copy of your data that lemmy world has on your former accounts, and report to the regulator if they ignore your request. Not sure if federation helps or hurts - like could you say that lemmy world must have something of your data since other federated servers still have a copy of your content?

    Would be nice if there was a way to use the GDPR here to bring some addtional accountability to the lemmy world admins.

    • InternetTubes@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      They purged the account and claimed that no other data is kept. I suppose I could present it against kbin.social, but my problem is the exact opposite, that they purged my comment history based on a lie that now both admins are keeping relatively quiet about hoping they can sweep it under the rug behind the curtains. I don’t want to hurt kbin.social, now would I want to hurt the Internet Wayback Machine. It’s thanks to both that I have proof of what really happened and that the claim they are standing behind is a lie.