this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:

V8lPrxY1qxcISLe.png

Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn't a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?

vyfUNYTrX9pHQeR.png

Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have... But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let's look at the number of bans per community hosted:

Yrc7TofOr88SeGt.png

Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?

Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Wow this is really interesting.

Actually this might be a great time to ask you for a feature request: lately I've been banned from SO MANY AI communities located on dbzer0, the trouble with that being that I've literally never heard of any of these, much less interacted with any of them, presumably even with a downvote.

Is this "harassment" then, to be preemptively banned from something on some other server that I had no intention of ever going to? What if someone were to create 10 communities a day and ban someone from them all? I guess that one would get noticed and shut down, but I would not put it past an AI content generator to do just this sort of thing, if it were given the ability to do so.

Anyway, perhaps those notifications could be silenced unless I've ever commented or at least voted in the community that I am being banned from? I don't need to know or care about something that I have zero interest in - these unsolicited bans are spam.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 36 minutes ago (1 children)
[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 31 minutes ago

Then I am glad I mentioned it!:-)

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 16 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

What makes you so sure the moderators are the problem, and not users? Maybe assholes gravitate toward certain instances, or people just don't bother to check whether an instance's rules match how tend to they post.

[–] tacosanonymous@mander.xyz 1 points 5 minutes ago

That and brigading. There are communities in several of the largest ban happy instances dedicated to find the worst shit people say then circlejerking over what an idiotic take it was. People get amped up, go there and can’t help but argue and they get banned.

There do be some ptb, though.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 12 points 3 hours ago (10 children)

Reading the comments I am wondering because a user from dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls and pawb I imagine has anti furry trolls. I also personally know of users that have a thing in their craw about .ml (cm0002 in particular whos alts make up a majority of my user block list).

[–] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

the anti-genai trolls never let up, unfortunately. they must have dedicated months of their lives spinning up new sock-puppet troll accounts to bully, harass, and threaten one of our mods on an almost daily basis. because bullying zir off the internet is a great win for the fight against evil AI, right? yep, such effective activism, telling someone to kill themselves repeatedly simply for the "sin" of liking foss genai.

[–] Muaddib@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah I looked into this a while ago and it's a concerning pattern. Every single time someone makes a post on YPTB about one particular dbzer0 mod, it seems as if they then go on to make ten alt accounts to harass him with transphobia. Lots of different accounts with a prior history, just pivoting to transphobic harassment right after they express a problem with his moderation. I gotta tell you, whoever is attacking that mod is fucking up if their intent is to hurt him, because he gets tons of sympathy and good PR about the whole thing. Lots of people go from being neutral to being on his side, because everyone who criticizes him suddenly turns out to be a transphobe. It's really strange.

[–] alzjim@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I feel like saying “him” and “he” might be misgendering them.

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[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 21 points 4 hours ago

ml bans anyone who isn't guzzling Putin's ballsack

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 13 points 4 hours ago

I'm not even a real instance anymore, how did I make the list 😆

But also, you should see the local numbers haha

lemmy=# select count(distinct other_person_id) from mod_ban where mod_person_id in (1, 2,288);
 count 
-------
  9792
(1 row)

I wonder what happens when I hit 10,000?

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 7 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I feel like this makes sense for very politically focused spaces, especially for less "mainstream" ideas like db0's anarchist communities, just cause not every community will allow arguments about their stance, and even ones that do will see more arguments turn into flame wars and incivility than communities for which there simply isnt as much for heated arguments to start over, especially when the arguments arent always something "new" to that space and might just be someone from outside noticing and saying "your ideology is bad because [insert reason that community has probably heard enough before to be tired of]".

Am a bit curious about why pawb is so high though, Ive not really noticed much of the hate that furries sometimes would get on other platforms (I guess it could be because theyre all banned but I doubt it, because that wouldnt hide it from communities outside of pawb). The instance administration has always felt rather reasonable whenever Ive seen like instance announcements or defederation decisions or such too, at least by my standards. Itd be interesting maybe to see what communities these bans tend to come from and what reasons are given, just looking through the modlog doesnt seem to help much there given that it doesnt seem to let one sort by instance.

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[–] maam@feddit.uk 5 points 3 hours ago

Lemmy.ml is marxist-leninist not marxist. The distinction is very important considering that the former term was created by the tyrant Stalin.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 7 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

the decision to graph per-community (i'll call those "commag"s) doesn't make sense to me. it seems to me like a bad approximation for lifetime total users that doesn't control for either instance attitudes on commag creation or troll account registration (these usually don't create communities). i'm unacquainted with pawb but i wouldn't think they're very ban-happy, and the fact that these graphs show them as twice as ban-happy per-community as, and a bit more ban happy than ml should tell you this isn't very good methodology.

it seems more like dbzer0 and pawb don't create many communities (but don't close stale ones either, unlike .world), which makes sense as the ones that do exist are quite focused and targetted to the instance userbase.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I was surprised to find that dbzer0 has 290 communities.

image

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 2 hours ago

i don't see how that has bearing on what i said lol. i argued about not creating many new communities and not closing inactive communities. the last new community i heard of were the two or three replacements for feddit, and just the 41st top community (41st since I estimate the photon pager has 40 items per page by default, and i clicked the top of page 2) has not have posts in over a month, let alone mod actions.

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