TLDR?

There has been some drama here on midwest.social, and those troubled by it have made a sister community at !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com. I’m looking for your input on how to move forward.

Where have you been?

This started unfolding at the end of 2024, unfortunately along with a pretty scary decline in my partner’s health, which has resulted in Lemmy taking a backseat in my life. This is ongoing, and highlights the immediate issue of !lotrmemes@midwest.social being largely unmoderated, which I’ll address below.

What exactly happened?

It feels irresponsible for me to give my own take on something that happened in my absence, but here’s a timeline as I understand it:

  • Luigi shoots a CEO.
  • User A comments something to the effect of “someone please kill this other person” on a midwest.social community.
  • User B reports the comment.
  • Admin at midwest.social bans User B for being a “Libbety lib lib.”
  • Users start moving away from midwest.social.
  • A new LOTR Memes community is started on lemmy.dbzer0.com.

Please have a look at https://lemmy.cafe/post/10511187 and form your own opinion.

What happens next?

I have seen calls to lock this community and sticky a post redirecting people to the new community, in an effort to consolidate users in one place. On the other hand, there are people still using and enjoying this community. I don’t want to abruptly take that away. One of Lemmy’s major benefits is user choice, including choice of instance, and if people are fine with staying here, who am I to force them out?

I would like to hear from the users here. This is your community. If you want to keep it separate, we will. If you want to fold in with the new one, we will. If we do keep this one open, we immediately need more mods, so please PM me if you’re interested in helping out. My partner has another hospital stay for a pretty major surgery at the end of this week and I will likely be dropping off the earth for awhile after that.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Zoidsberg

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    13 hours ago

    Just let the community keep running and see what happens. I’ll help moderate it.

    It’d be a shame to lose one of the few major communities on Lemmy not hosted by one of the major servers, imho. If midwest.social admins keep making unpopular decisions, then this community will probably wither and the db0 one will take over. But I feel like that ban was pretty funny even though I disagree with it, so I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

    The alternative could also occur, if some shit goes down on db0 and the new community actually implodes. I have no reason to expect that to happen, but you never know. Best to let things play out, I’m subscribed to both communities anyhow and crossposting is also something that is quite simple on Lemmy.

    Also there’s about 1000 posts and 10k comments on this community and it’s mostly good content, built up over like 2 years. I just hate leaving all that behind and having to start over. I think of new users viewing by top posts of all time and this is one of the better Lemmy communities for that.