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
Didn’t know much about this community, but honestly it gets some of my respect for pushing against the current main narrative.
Violence isn’t necessarily always a bad thing - otherwise, Europe and Japan would look drastically different today.
Leaving out that the reporter was a mass reporter likely stirring up trouble, I think it’s natural in dire and extreme times for people to wish for more extreme actions to happen to evil people. It’s not as of people wishing that will necessarily do it (just in case, I wish for enough money to buy a house and retire with the basics), it’s just a way for them to vent the frustration they have at Injustice they can’t otherwise do anything about.
Not to mention silencing the side that wishes death against those advocating for the death of others always seemed to be… Hypocritical to me.
So in all, I think this community’s admins did good. If people left over that, maybe it’s for the better not to have them.
Just to clarify, as far as I understand, this LOTR meme community and the mods here were not directly involved in that incident. I believe the comment was made on a different community on the Midwest.social instance, and removed by the instance admin.
I understand that you’re in favor of it and I see your point, but I just wanted to clarify the language. Especially with people talking about new users coming to Lemmy, its important to help them understand how it all fits together.
There’s no such thing as a community admin, an admin is basically supervising the entire server/instance (midwest.social), and community moderators run individual communities (such as !lotrmemes@midwest.social) that are hosted on a particular server/instance.