In my view as a long-time moderator, the purpose of moderation is conflict resolution and ensuring the sitewide rules are followed. As reported today by !vegan@lemmyworld, moderator Rooki’s vision appears to be that their personal disagreement with someone else’s position takes priority over the rules and is enough to remove comments in a community they don’t moderate, remove its moderators for the comments, and effectively resort to hostile takeover by posting their own comment with an opposing view (archived here) and elevating it for visiblity.
The removed comments relate to vegan cat food. As seen in the modlog, Rooki removed a number of pretty balanced comments explaining that while there are problematic ways to feed cats vegan, if done properly, cats can live on vegan cat food. Though it is a controversial position even among vegans, there is scientific research supporting it, like this review from 2023 or the papers co-authored by professor Andrew Knight. These short videos could also work as a TL;DR of his knowledge on the matter. As noted on Wikipedia, some of the biggest animal advocacy organizations support the notion of vegan cat food, while others do not. Vegan pet food brands, including Ami, Evolution Diet, and Benevo have existed for years and are available throughout the world, clearly not prohibited by law in countries with laws against animal abuse.
To summarize, even if you don’t agree with the position of vegan cat food being feasible, at the very least you have to acknowledge that the matter is not clear-cut. Moreover, there is no rule of lemmy.world that prohibits those types of conversations unless making a huge stretch to claim that it falls under violent content “promoting animal abuse” in the context of “excessive gore” and “dismemberment”.
For the sake of the argument, even if we assume that the truth is fully on Rooki’s side and discussions of vegan cat food is “being a troll and promoting killing pets”, the sitewide rules would have to be updated to reflect this view, and create a dangerous precedent, enabling banning for making positive comments about junk food (killing yourself), being parents who smoke (killing your kids), being religious “because it’s not scientific” and so on. Even reddit wouldn’t go that far, and there are plenty of conversations on vegan cat food on reddit.
Given Rooki’s behavior and that it has already resulted in forcing the vegan community out of lemmy.world and with more likely to follow, I believe the only right course of action is to remove them as a moderator to help restore the community’s trust in the platform and reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future.
What’s inconsistent about that? Communities have their own rules, which often are and should be much stricter than the sitewide rules. For example, a pro-Harris community may decide to ban pro-Trump posts (or vice versa) to keep it on-topic, but that wouldn’t justify a site admin removing the mods and their comments for that. Some communities exist specifically for debates, while others choose to be more of a safe space type.
Yes, and instances have their own overriding sitewide rules. Some instances exist specifically for misinformation or the encouragement of reprehensible behavior, or at least advertise themselves as a safe space for it, and some don’t.
It’s also relevant that (edit:
Rooki’sI was wrong) the community’s first reaction was the kind of reasoned discussion that some people are now saying should be the answer (as opposed to this heavy handed censorship), and then only after (edit:Rooki’s) reasoned discussion was deleted and they were banned, did they shrug their shoulders and say well if just hitting the “fuck you” button is within bounds then I’ve got one of those buttons too.I think it can be written down as a useful learning experience for the vegan club about how the world works, if they decide to learn from it.