I created this post on my local server, calling for what I thought was reasonable action against a self-proclaimed threat to Canada.
Someone in the community disagreed (fine), and reported the post on their hosting instance (lemmy.world), which led to an immediate deletion of the post (on that single instance only).
Think is, I really don’t feel that it was warranted - and neither do most of the community members over on lemmy.ca.
I realize that instances are autonomous, but is there an appeal process to potentially have this reinstated?
As an admin of lemmy.ca I’m also curious what justified removal of this post from your instance, when the community is not hosted or moderated by anyone from lemmy.world.
It makes me deeply uncomfortable to think that outside users are seeing a view of our communities that has been filtered or modified, without having any way to know it is happening.
Edit: I’ve spun out this thread for further discussion, as I think this is an important topic - https://lemmy.ca/post/12845463
Arent federated comments and posts from you instance hosted on each server you federated with? Admins of each individual server have the right to moderate content seen by their users. If they couldn’t remove individual comments or posts, then the only other option they would have if your users are breaking another server’s rules would be to defederate.
In this particular case, I feel like the removal was unjustified.
Yes, but we have a post that is political in nature being removed by admins of the largest instance. If this was child porn I wouldn’t be concerned, but this is on a post that I don’t think even violates lemmy.world rules.
I don’t think instance admins should be actioning reports, unless they are in clear violation of instance rules. Reports should be left to the mods of that community. By actioning on reports like this lemmy.world is effectively acting as a censor, and as the largest instance they control what most lemmy users see. That makes me uncomfortable.
Can’t agree more. All we can do is reduce the user dominance.
I think the federated nature makes it tough to just have a blanket policy of leaving it up to the community mods. Ideally you would want the report to go through the community mods and then the host instance admins first, but you might not be able to contact those instance admins to see if they have looked at the post. You also have no control of the community mods and would not expect them to remove the post because of your rules.
Even with that, I do agree that something should change. As it stands, you can have posts disappear from largest Lemmy server from seemingly arbitrary admin decisions and there’s no formal process to appeal. It seems like you would need some sort of Alliance where you all agree to certain guidelines and have a formal process for these cross-server disputes.
Maybe there should also be some sort of ‘Approved by host admin’ system so that other admins can at least know that you looked at it.
I think that the default should be that when something is deleted it should say deleted by “Admins of whatever” that way people at least know their view is being tampered with and could investigate if they’re so inclined.
This has been an interesting bit of discussion, to say the least. Different instances with different local rules are going to lead to problems like this situation more and more, as lemmy grows in popularity. It’s inevitable, and we’re all going to have to sort it out as the platform matures.
However the more I think about it, the more concerned I am that removing individual posts (or even comments) on a federated instance has the potential to misrepresent communities, through the filter of each instance’s mod/admin biases.
Perhaps a pointer saying “this post was removed on lemmy,world for violating rule (x), and can be viewed on its original instance <link>” would be appropriate. Or alternatively, blocking entire communities with a comparable stub: “lemmy.world has chosen not to federate community@instance.”
Of course in my examples I’m picking on lemmy.world because that’s where this is happening, but the problem and possible solutions are true for all instances.