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New Reddit art MOD team reversed 5093 bans out of 5156 bans that were issued in 2025.
(lemmy.tevtra.com)
Holy shit.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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To be fair, I would not be surprised the learn the exact same thing is happening on Lemmy, to exactly the same degree of severity.
Lemmy isn't really any better than Reddit in this regard, unfortunately.
This is entirely down to the instances and how they administer the moderators on their communities. The big difference is that if such a thing happened on the fediverse, if it's really bad, members of the community could recreate it on another instance and take the userbase.
Ie if the moderators of art@lemmy.world lost the plot, it could be remade on art@lemmy.zip. That doesn't work so well on reddit because "art", the natural name is taken.
Yes, that is the benefit of federation, but the downside is that if a user is forcibly removed from participation in a community they liked, it won't really matter that they created a new one if they can't tell the users in the old community to migrate. But this is talking about worst case scenarios where mods mass ban thousands of users indiscriminately, and not considering something more specific such as when a mod has a personal issue with a specific user and lets their personal feeling get in the way of their job as moderator.
Speaking as a moderator (even though I don't really do much on a low traffic community), if a mod bans specific users just because they don't like those users, that's an abuse of power. But that abuse of power will largely go unchecked because it isn't big enough of a problem for most users to take issue with, usually.
Banned users will typically either ban evade by creating alt accounts on different instances, or not participate in any Lemmy community other than some community focused on mod power abuse, for example.
Well this is true - on an individual user level. But I am talking about a situation where a mod team (or even just 1 moderator) is so bad, so hated that enough of the userbase for that community get fed up - they could just make their own and use tools like !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to advertise what they're doing (this does work).
Obviously if it's just you aggrieved with how a community is run, you'll find it much harder. But that's true anywhere.
Oh absolutely, and it's not realistic to expect administrators of medium to high level instances to micro-manage and oversee all moderator decisions within their instance. But I imagine if you lost the plot on your !cars@lemmy.world community and started banning people for frivolous infractions, you'd be credibly replaced by a competing community in relative short-order and I would imagine its more likely that the lemmy admins would remove you eventually.
If I started power tripping, I would hope I would be replaced. But instance admins have a rough job just keeping the instance running. Smaller communities are bound to slip through the cracks.
Im just saying, while Lemmy has more protections perhaps than Reddit, it isnt really that different.
Eh, they'd likely be directly told that @righthandofikaros@lemmy.world is losing it rather than manually checking the local logs.
I always see this argument here.
But on Reddit it’s just as easy to make your own new sub with a different name.
In both cases you still have the same problem.
Depends on the subreddit. Many topics have what would be-called natural names that people naturally look for. Suppose you don't like how r/television is ran. What are you gunna do? Make your own? What you gunna call it? r/tv-shows? Maybe (but that's also already taken). r/television2? r/bettertelevision?
Also, how are you gunna effectively advertise it? Reddit is way too big for a new small communtiy in most cases, unless it directly sources from another large community.
You see the uphill problem here?
yes, it's an uphill problem. but i would argue on lemmy or fediverse in general the slope is not as steep. For example if you're banned in !games@lemmy.world you can just move on to !games@sh.itjust.works. banned there too? go to !gaming@lemmy.ml. places like piefed included those 3 communities into the same topic so wherever you posted people that goes to piefed gaming topic would still see your post. But then again if you find yourself eventually getting banned no matter where you bounce to, ESPECIALLY in fediverse then you have to look into the most common denominator...
I think for lemmy, or fediverse in general the biggest benefit is for people who owns their own instance. if let say i (from my own instance) post into some other lemmy art instance and the same thing as reddit r/art happened there and i got banned and a mod removed all my posts there. in the case of r/art and Hayden Clay, Hayden would have lost ALL his previous posts, without the ability to get it back. Even his previously wildly popular posts are nuked, along with his other portfolio. but for lemmy solo instance owners, yes the posts are removed from the community where they were banned from, but on their own instance it's still there along with all the history, if you go back to your instance you can still get the post. From there you can just move on to other community. If a user asked for your portfolio you can just give a link back to those previous post at the very least.
There's a elite few mods on Reddit with power over 500 subs. That can't happen here.
Why can't it?
What prevents that from happening here?
It's a lot less likely. Instance owners are closer to the management of the communities than Reddit admins are. Many would not accept it and remove moderators like that from their communities.
I think it definitely can still happen, as there are no definitive ways totally prevent it. But imho the chances are less likely because the nature of fediverse where the communities are scattered (which some people feel is a weak point of fediverse) act as cushion to minimize the impact. for example i think it's highly unlikely a mod in programming.dev community is also a a mod in sh.itjust.works.
But let's just say what is that guy managed to apply as mod in both place? it's also quite unlikely if sh.itjust.works admin agree with the mod's abusive action that programming.dev's admin would think the same way.
Public mod logs mean that, while it can still happen, everybody knows it's happening. There is no guessing. There is no gaslighting. It's public. It's much easier to deal with problematic mods/admins/instance owners when it is public.