The public modlog is one of the best features of Lemmy, IMO. When a Lemmy user appeals to the public of stuff mods/admins have done, we can call BS on them since we can read through stuff if they've been toxic, or if it's the mods on a power-trip, or if it's controversially borderline but reasonable discretion given the circumstances.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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It also got rid of some toxic mods since their actions are also public.
I remember a Reddit powermod complaining about it after the big migration.
The mod log certainly helps, because it leaves a public trail of evidence for each ban, but it ultimately still depends on the server admin, because they are in charge of choosing their mods. But at least no one can ban you from the platform entirely, at worst you can get banned from an entire instance.
I didn't know that. I think on reddit that would have creeped me out but I might not end up minding as much here.
Reddit will tell you why you were banned. It generates a PM with the reason and a link to the offending post.
For example, I was banned for inciting violence towards a protected group of people… in reference to saying child predators should face stiffer legal penalties. Someone took it the wrong (or maybe right) way because their president is in the Epstein files. Honestly I wasn’t even thinking of him but if the prison jumpsuit fits… anyway, it was not a mystery to me.
I did appeal in case AI flagged me but a human upheld it.
But as to why Lemmy is better in that regard… more open platform trying to improve upon the formula of those that came before. Also run by people not corporations. And not operated by the GOP.
Of course, on Lemmy things also depend on your instance. I got banned fromba group by a mod that is at the same time a lemmy.ml admin for mentioning that China is putting Uyghyrs to concentration camps.
On lemmy.ml you can get banned for things you wouldn't get elsewhere. The solution for that is to join a group for the same theme but hosted on another instance. I'm in three communities hosted on .ml, because their alternatives are not active enough. But, of course I always prefer the non-.ml alternative when available.
Which three?
I was thinking about that yesterday. What if corporations decide that the way the Fediverse does things (especifically Lemmy and Mastodon) is the right way to go? By that I mean chronological order of posts, community-centered and small web). It doesn't have to be big corporations, just people financially interested enough to bring money without really wanting to change things. That would be chaotic to the current state of the Fediverse.
There are several layers to this: maybe the government of Austria thinks it's a good idea to put money into this; or maybe Philips (from the Netherlands) decides to pour money on the current state of the Fediverse or make its own real Fediverse (not faux-Fediverse like Bluesky).
I'm pretty new to this, so I can't really game it out in my mind what the effect would be. My first instinct is to say that they would pour money into one instance, probably the biggest one, and the rest of the federated instances would just go about their merry way.
In fact, there are corporate federated services... I mean Bluesky is kinda federated, so is, I think Threads by Facebook/Instagram? But a lot of services don't federate with it because they don't like the people behind them.
Lemmy sucks at this, what are you on about?
It doesn't tell you. You have to check manually, and the mod/admin can literally hide entries on the log if they wanted to (as well as not bother with typing out a reason or give a bs one).
I like Lemmy a lot, but the way you are informed of mod actions against you is absolute dogshit.
i was just banned for "multiple violations" like 1min ago but they didn't say what i did.
You know
I don’t
Oh. My bad
Because Lemmy is moderated by human beings.
Think of Reddit as Cyberpunk or Mirror's Edge: a world controlled by corporations instead of governments. A corporation only seeks its own interests and those of its shareholders. In that world, you're nothing. There's no transparency, and you don't have any rights.
Lemmy instances on the other hand are run by the community and funded by donations. As such, the interests of the group as a whole prevail; they are not the interests of shareholders. To maintain cohesion, transparency is necessary, hence the modlog. Without transparency, cohesion and community cannot be maintained.
Reddit and Lemmy are two completely different worlds.
I got banned from jai.lu, reason "reactionary"
🤷🏼♀️
aka, not a tankie
Yeah I guess so 😂
Jlailu is quite anti-tankie, we had some problems with them before, to the point of considering alternatives to Lemmy due to the ideology of the creators. As the average of Lemmy, it's also no very tolerant with conservative ideas, but I have no idea what happened to this user in particular.
That's very subjective.
Both platforms have the option for mods to tell you exactly what you did wrong; and on both, sometimes they utilize that option sometimes they don't.
It's entirely up to the individual mods in each specific community.
Lemmy does generally tend to be a bit more open; just because it's a growing platform looking to expand its userbase, so the mods make a bit more of an effort to create peace/understanding vs just ban hammering any problems into oblivion.
Reddits grown big enough that it can throw its weight around a bit carelessly and have less worry of the userbase collapsing.
Smaller community size. It is a lot easier to moderate a small community instead of a large one.
It is also the reason why Reddit moderators fought the API ban. Reddit moderators had developed their own tech stack to help them moderate the very large subs. Lemmy isn't at the size where those tools are needed.
I was banned for using a slur. I was quoting a line from a movie (in quotation marks) in a post about that movie. It was so obviously a quote.
Was helping a commenter with his gun problem and wondered if there was something he could try "to retard the action". Mods were great in that sub, but still almost caught ban. "We don't use that word here."
That’s pretty sad. It’s a word with various meanings, you can’t just ban the word outright. In the medical community we might say that a chemical can “retard growth of cells.” Properly used it’s a viable scientific term.
Sometimes. Some servers will "rule 1" you and rule one basically amounts to "don't say things I don't like."
And then sometimes you say the Tiflis bank robbery was bad because they blew up innocent people on the street with grenades, and then a guy responds that "it was pretty cool actually," and then you get banned for saying "well I hope something cool happens to you then" in an attempt to get them to empathize with the victims by putting themselves as the victim instead if the "pretty cool" robbers, despite being the one who in practice is against the murder of innocents, and then you can't tell if you were banned because the mod couldn't process the context of the thread or because they were a tankie who agrees murdering innocents is, in fact, pretty cool. I mean, sure I was being rude becauase I'm not usually nice when people say murdering innocents in the process of a bank robbery is "pretty cool," so, 50/50, but it's still silly.
And then sometimes you get banned because one person on your server has an argument with one mod on another and the second mod decides to ban your whole instance as a result because he's totally not butthurt.
It's a little more transparent, but this place can be just as silly as reddit.
Yeah ₙₒ. The few times I’ve been banned or had my comment removed on reddit, I was told that it happened. On Lemmy, the reason listed is just as obscure and esoteric, but you have to seek it out yourself to even find out it happened
Yup. Rule 1, rule 3, troll, etc. I get that people would rather just write the rule or a simple explanation, but even some of the developers/mods use it to hide behind. Sometimes it seems like they stretch the rule as far as it'll go to fit the need.
Give it time. Lemmy will become like Reddit given enough use base and time. It’s inevitable.
Especially as reddit keeps banning hundreds of people everyday and those people will get tired of evading bans and come here.
Just hope it takes years for the bots to arrive here since there is no money to be made.
Pretty sure they are already among us
Sometimes it's a tactic to discourage escalation because it adds confusion.
There's no central authority forcing things to be one way or the other, so to the extent that there are differences they are cultural in nature.
I'd assume the biggest reason, in addition to what others have said, is the difference in user numbers. It's a lot easier to be a good mod at this scale than at the massive scale of Reddit, especially with the rampant AI bots, and without powerful tools like defederation, the clearly visible mod log, etc.
I'd assume most people bothering to moderate, even on Reddit, intend to do a good job with every report, but being overworked forces people's hand.
Well, they'll sometimes tell you a reason you got a ban, but not the reason you got a ban.
fewer ppl, more time