To be clear, I have not had any issue whatsoever here on Beehaw. The philosophy that they/we are trying to uphold is admirable and seems to have helped foster and preserve positive and constructive conversation. Of course this isn’t going to always be the case, especially on other instances. I have been wondering how the Fediverse in general and Beehaw specifically will react when the source of aggressive and toxic comments are moderators of their own instances and those instances are very popular.

A lot of people have been coming over from reddit, regular users as well as mods. It’s reasonable to expect that some of the issues that existed on reddit would crop up here. One thing that is unique to the Fediverse is the ability to see the history of moderated comments and posts. This makes it possible to have some community oversight over the mods themselves. So my question is, once a moderator exhibits problematic behavior, what is the appropriate community response? Obviously we could block the community or the entire instance, but that has the potential to cut us off from a significant number of conversations if we block a large community when the problem is coming from a single individual or small group.

This is an open ended question regarding best practices for all communities, I’d appreciate some insight into the thinking process or if there is an established protocol. For context, my concerns were prompted by a specific conversation. I am a big Star Trek fan and was looking forward to being part of a fresh community in the Fediverse in part because of experiences I had in /r/startrek and I got the feeling that my experience was not an isolated situation. Full disclosure: It was the only sub I ever got banned from. The ban was the result of trying to discuss the Paramount streaming service and their ad practices. Arguably not on-topic for a Star Trek sub, sure but most of us Trekkies got forced into an awkward situation with Paramount because of their licensing practices. Anyway, the response I got from the mods at that time was curt and final and it really left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole community. Well apparently the same mod team has created a Lemmy instance; startrek.website. I attempted to subscribe (it still shows as Pending) and I started catching up with the posts. One of the recent posts yesterday was: https://beehaw.org/post/517566 celebrating 100 users. One of the few comments read:

Live long and prosper, c/startrek! 🖖 Oh yeah are we going to get banned for nothing here too or is it cool to have varying opinions now? by @OccamsTeapot@lemmy.world

That caught my attention because it is not the first time I’ve heard similar complaints about /r/startrek, so I was curious how this community would handle contrary opinions and discussions that don’t put a particular show or episode in a flattering light (something that most Start Trek fans enjoy to some extent even though, or because it’s one of their favorite franchises). Unfortunately this comment was responded to very harshly. I did not get a screenshot of the comments and they have since been deleted by the user . They were disparaging comments to say the least, but I do not want to try to recount them from memory as it might not be accurate and the specific language is irrelevant. However, I felt the need to reply to OccamsTeapot to commiserate and to point out that they were not in the wrong and that they did not disserve to be attacked.

@distractionfactory to Star Trek@startrek.website • Celebrating 100+ users • Definitely the most toxic comments I’ve seen so far. I was excited to find a star Trek community gaining traction here, but this guy’s got me looking into how to block their comments. Literally the first time I’ve had any desire to do that on this platform. The experience up to this thread has been overwhelming positive. Hopefully we can use the features of this platform to keep hot heads like that from gaining power.

I’m not sure why, but this comment never made it to that post’s history, maybe for the same reason my subscription is pending. This was before I realized that the “hot head” in question was not only the OP, but a mod, and was apparently a mod from /r/startrek, possibly the one that OccamsTeapot was expressing frustration with. I went back to see if he had replied today and noticed the entire conversation was removed:

I was able to find the comments removed by the mod because they are logged, but not the comments by the mod himself because he deleted them from his own account: “removed by mod” comments

This moderator escalated the situation immediately with no provocation, threw out juvenile insults, then tried to erase the entire thread. Not only did he remove his own inappropriate replies, but the initial comment that triggered them. I don’t think OccamsTeapot realized he would offend anyone by the question, and the only reason to take offense is if this person was involved in the drama on reddit. It’s a valid concern that I think a lot of people moving to Lemmy might share and suppressing it is entirely inappropriate. The one thing that is clear is that criticism of mods behavior will be just as poorly received on startrek.website as it was on /r/startrek.

This kind of behavior makes me hesitant to contribute to that community, not only for fear that my comments might be removed or I might be banned, but that the discussions that I am reading are being censored and curated to an extent that they don’t represent the community, but an echo chamber that had been curated on reddit.

Maybe I have been lucky, but I haven’t encountered this kind of abuse of power anywhere else on Lemmy, has anyone else run into this yet?