PTB, @rimu@piefed.social just loves to manufacture outrage for stupid reasons, or for no reason at all. That response and kicking @Quokka@quokk.au was straight out of left field.
Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Posting Guidelines
All posts should follow this basic structure:
- Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
- What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
- Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
- Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
- Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
- Don’t use private communications to prove your point. We can’t verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don’t deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don’t harass mods or brigade comms. Don’t word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin’ in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
- If you are the accused PTB, while you are welcome to respond, please do so within the relevant post.
- Keep the comments in YPTB posts about the moderation action itself, not about the general topic in which the moderation took place.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
YPTB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless Mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
the PTB continues
mia:
asks to remove insult to peoples intelligence from the function name for the hardcoded 'low effort' post filter
rimu:
'i'll have you know i am not transphobic, see i made a pronoun tag'
mia:
attempts to de-escalate and explain that this was not a personal criticism
kicked
Oh and the real kicker ? Rimu did all this after his big grand post about how he is stepping back from drama and hiding away from users.
when i read that post the subtext was always 'i'm isolating myself from anyone critical, only interacting through alts and toadies going forward'
like say what you will about the lemmy devs they've received way more criticism, targeted harassment and smears over the years without needing to turn it into a big vendetta like this has been. for example i've said that i think nutomic should step back in the past because of his actions! while i wish he handled that situation better and
while i wish his apology for it was better,
at least since then he has left us alone and has largely stepped back from moderating things, rather than attempting to actively silence all dissent
Being a developer is difficult, because a lot of people pay attention to what you say. And any mistake can get a lot of visibility. Sometimes I wish that Lemmy was a company, with a community manager who takes care of these things. But anyway, it is how it is.
in your case as well it doesn't help that there's a subset of ideologically motivated people just waiting to jump on any comment to run a smear campaign on it.
for me actions speak louder than words and despite my initial disappointment following the dm leak, years have passed and i haven't seen that turn into a pattern of behavior.
i will say i kind of prefer that lemmy isn't a company, in part because frankly i trust a handful of communists to not just hand over user info and ip addresses to the alphabet boys more than i would any sort of company
Why is every maintainer of the threadiverse unhinged, like I switched to piefed partially because I disagreed with the politics of the Lemmy devs, and recently the piefed dev does weird stuff. Does making foss software really have that big of an effect on someone's mental health?
The unfortunate truth is people who are enamored with programming find it so enticing because it's a part of the universe that works exactly the way you tell it (for better or worse). Kind of like how kids who are traumatized build forts to hide in or something.
If code doesn't do what you want there's a way to fix it and make it behave. There seems to be a correlation where the best programmers can't tolerate the unpredictability of other human beings or reality...
To be clear, yes I'm a programmer too, and yes I built forts as a kid so this is speaking from experience from talking to other IT/programmer people 😂 it's a common theme I've noticed.
Because us developers, we are just a couple of nerds on the Internet. We didn't study public relations or politics at university, and don't know which spontaneous comment might generate a shitstorm. Unlike /u/spez we don't have a PR team writing posts for us. And because there is no profit motive, Lemmy and Piefed don't need to appeal to everyone like Reddit does. Consider it the price to pay for using a non-commercial platform.
It becomes tantalizing when you have your software running on others systems to see what you can get away with.
FOSS is notorious for egomaniacs. That's why there's so many forks and endless implementations of basically the same shit! Just with some new unpronounceable name that'll often be abandoned in short order.
This is probably one of the most terminally online things i've seen so far
This is particularly hilarious God Complex behavior coming from the person that just recently tried to argue for essentially a Fediverse UN... 100% missing the entire point of federation, that there is no one single central authority.
Like this is lolcow behavior, just very plainly.
Yeah, that is a weird jump in accusations. Like... completely non-sequitur. If some important context isn't missing, this is weird behavior. possibly a sign of pathological issues.
so, yeah, unless something important is missing, PTB
Stamets wrote up an amazing summary of events so far if you can find it.
There’s a lot of previous drama Rimu has made that you can see across the few posts below this one and on the Fediverse comms. The latest thing was he shadowbanned quokk.au so their posts don’t show up in all or new users can find the instance to join.
He’s declared war on anarchists and all other leftists basically.
Edit: He has now provided his “justification” for the act

Mind you he hasn’t kicked anyone else on the same “side” as her.
Mind you he hasn’t kicked anyone else on the same “side” as her.
No one besides an "individual moderator" here on dbzer0 has made him upset enough to do so. I reckon that'll will change soon enough.
I can’t believe Rimu is antagonising friendly Quokka. What happened to him in the last few weeks?
When a lot of people criticised him and left the Piefed general group chat he responds so poorly.





the more I see of Rimu's behavior, the less inclined I am to believe he's an adult.
PTB
"look at me im an ally!" like no bro, you dont get to decide that yourself. because you didnt get a pat on the back for this, or an apology for your perceived wrongdoings you ban them, immediately after they try to peacefully deescalate the situation. crazy behavior.
Apparently, so long as someone isn't openly anti-AI, it's ok to use bigoted language towards them. This is, sadly, pretty standard fare for the typical liberal, who is perfectly happy to descend into homophobia or transphobia if it means they can use it to mock their their political opponents.
Aside from the silly drama i dont care about, stupid is a bad word now? What the fuck.
I'm not a close (or any kind of) follower of these dramas, but judging by the kind of unhinged "fans" PieFed seemed to attract, and the expressed reason(s) for that attraction, I wouldn't be surprised at all if trying to appease them for months is taking a heavy toll.
"stupid" is problematic
no it isn't
To me, this is an example of something that people blow out of proportion. Is the word stupid to describe someone's post mean? Yes, a little. Could it be improved by renaming it low effort? Definitely. I see no reason why this would be controversial.
Does that mean the word stupid is bad in all contexts? No, probably not. If your friend is being stupid, there's just being stupid.