I’ve been trying to disentangle from this whole thing, since I feel like I’ve reiterated what I had to say about it at some length for people who are interested to hear it, but I’ll address this:

Is it really a big deal getting a random ban from a community you don’t particularly care about in order to help protect the mod of that community from a harassment campaign? Since you like your Socrates, which one of those two things is worse? Which one is more likely to lead to self harm or psychological damage?

Instigating balkanization and random attacks on random users, and then justifying it by getting all histrionic about how some totally different person did something horrible (and, obviously, was banned for it) and somehow that needs to attach to me and OP, because reasons, is harmful. It is itself a harassment campaign. It also, as I keep pointing out, has literally nothing at all to do with protecting this moderator from the original actual harassment campaign. It’s like “stop and frisk.” It’s like throwing all the communists in prison because one allegedly set fire to the Reichstag. It won’t solve the problem, it’s just an excuse to attack.

I don’t care about the ban itself, certainly not enough to speak directly to the mod in question and risk being attacked for “harassing” them by sending them DMs. They’re welcome to weigh in here if they want, I’m sure they’re aware of the conversation. My concern is with the underlying logic and people doubling down on it here. Picking fights with random people for no reason at all, declaring them as enemies because of a vague alleged association with some enemy “community,” and encouraging tribalization of the space into a series of little “with us or against us” houses because of the actions of a handful of dickheads, hurts all of us. Making excuses for it, because the tribe of the person doing the balkanization happens to line up with your tribe, is also I would argue actually hurting their mental health also in the long run. You’re missing an opportunity to call them out on behaviors which if they’re doing them in real life will hurt them a lot more than anything that can happen just with the keyboard and screens.

I get the idea that they’ve been hurt by these attacks and they feel like they need to start lashing out and everyone becomes an enemy who does anything even vaguely (not really) similar, and so if they can throw enough preemptive accusations at anything that even reminds them of the other thing, then they’ll feel safe. If that is what is happening, then I get it. I think the solution, like I already said, would be more of an open dialogue with that person. Honestly I think maybe the people they’re close to (i.e. not me, who’s already classed as an “enemy” somehow) should be making sure they feel supported and like people are going to go to bat for them against any trolls or attackers who come their way. I’m sure there are plenty of drive-by “lol AI sucks” comments coming into these communities from time to time. If they feel like they’re alone and already vulnerable and then it gets coupled with more vicious attacks once people sense that they’re vulnerable (which, again, this is all instigating 10 times more of), then yeah that can be really distressing. I get it. If that’s what is going on. So just be vigorous against the actual problem.

If I were the type of malicious person who liked to throw insults and create new accounts to sling mud at someone who I knew it would really work effectively to upset, then getting banned from these random communities and then finding out the whole drama would definitely put them 100% on my radar as a worthwhile target to attack. I think a good conversation with the mod helping them understand some of how this stuff functions and making sure they know that the db0 admins will be in their corner when something does inevitably happen would help them to feel actually better about it and be able to be in a better mental state, where what they’re currently doing will do the opposite. But also, the flip side of that is protecting other people against them, making sure that you’re not just feeding into any particular attack that someone who’s in the club feels like making at any time against someone who’s not in it.

Does that make sense? Maybe not, that’s just how I see it.

I’m not trying to shut you up, and I hope you’re doing the same. I’m just trying to say I understand and sympathize with Mystic here. You saw today just one of the things people will do to zir just because they post content online.

Is every mod action there fair? Fuck if i know, I’m not one of the mods there. I don’t like being an mod on Lemmy, I made this account to avoid that when I abandoned the last time I was.

I don’t wish to keep this going I don’t think either one of us is going to suddenly change our views here. We could go for hours or days on end, and go nowhere with it.

I’m going to make my coffee and try to be with my friends this morning. This is not a “haha I win, I’m leaving now” this is me explaining why I’m not coming back for a debate for today at least.

Yeah, I mean it’s fine. I’m not trying to “debate,” I’m trying to get you to grasp the point that I was banned for literally no reason at all. I’ve never participated in that community, I’m not an “anti-AI troll,” I’m not harassing them by any stretch of the possible imagination. My only participation even adjacent to that is sometimes from my previous account upvoting content from the main Stable Diffusion community because I like it. I sometimes talk negatively about some types of AI, as it happens I have some recent comments talking positively about it, but I don’t really have any kind of tribal affiliation either for or against.

I don’t know why you keep bringing stuff that other people have done into the conversation, and trying to triangulate this thing where because this moderator was harassed by somebody else, that means they have a right to accuse anybody they want of anything they want. That doesn’t make any sense to me, I think it’s a toxic pattern that should be called out when it happens. That’s the only reason I care to any degree about any of this. I am unlikely to participate in any of the places I was banned from, overall it’s fine. My point is just that falling into this thinking where we have to be in tribes and one person from one tribe was a victim and so they lashed out at a bunch of other people and it’s okay because they’re a victim, that’s wrong.

I don’t think it’s odd to think there’s users targeting harassment them, when examples pop up without being asked.

You know what? Let’s try some Socratic teaching.

The people harassing the mod should be:

1. Banned
2. Not banned

The people not harassing the mod or doing anything wrong should be:

1. Banned
2. Not banned

I feel like this should be an easy test, but let’s see what you come up with.

That has literally nothing at all to do with banning me. We might as well talk about banning you, because that user said that. That’s as much relationship that comment has to the subject of OP’s post.

(I also think it’s sort of convenient that a new user popped up and started making cartoonishly harassing comments about the person we’re talking about, thus propping up the “mods need the ability to ban totally random people, because look at this person he’s so bad look at what a terrible thing he did, I 100% guarantee you that the mod banning random people is always the victim and never the harasser no matter what they ever do” narrative.)

I reported that comment, as I’m sure some other people did. You do understand that has literally nothing at all to do with banning other users who haven’t done anything that that person did?

Am I the weird one in this conversation? I’m having this sort of Alice in Wonderland feeling here.

This is such a weird conversation.

“Your honor, we’re asking for the ability to send this man to prison.”

“But he hasn’t done anything…”

“Yes, but others have, and they’ve sent death threats to the prosecutor, too. They’re the worst. I rest my case.”

See this is a person we can ban lol

I didn’t do any of the things you said, nothing even close to it, and I got banned. That’s what I mean by “uninvolved parties.” I’m sure I am not the only one.

I don’t see how banning random third party people is going to be a solution to that. Actually, I would expect it to make things worse, since anyone who wanted to make one of those bots can still do all of that exactly as much or as little as they could before (and obviously be banned for it exactly as they would be able to before), but also she’s going to get additional people irritated at her because she’s now lashing out at uninvolved parties.

Boots into secure bootstrap

npm install

I’m not sure that the Ken Thompson type of backdoor is even on the radar as an urgent enough threat to be worth worrying about at this point. I mean, it’s fine, but the boot-i-est of bootstraps at this point is the network hardware that’s running the network you are trying to secure, and most of it is riddled with holes which are likely to largely undo whatever you’re trying to do sad to say.

It’s a hell of a lot wider than one specific sloppy contractor. They basically compromised everybody (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Spectrum, Lumen, Consolidated Communications, Windstream, the system for CALEA requests, routers made by Cisco, phones belonging to Trump and Vance… basically, everything.) Viasat is on that list, but they’re no more particularly sloppy than any other contractor in that space. Basically it would have been truly remarkable if some Guard agency had managed to hire a cloud contractor that was able to resist it.

Hope you enjoy! Yeah, for me it is the best. It’s pretty horror, as horror goes, just so you’re aware.

Yeah. “Nightmares and Dreamscapes” was out of the cocaine days and into the normal period, so I don’t have the same level of love for it as I do for the earlier stuff, but it still had some absolute gems. It was still in the golden age.

They also made a made-for-TV miniseries of “The Langoliers” which was far better and more accurate than it had any right to be. Whoever did the CGI for it clearly had basically nothing to work with and still did their best lol.

The mod in question is apparently convinced that Lemmy is full of “anti-AI trolls” who are planning to brigade their communities with mass downvotes, accuse them of pedophilia, send death threats, and all kinds of stuff.

“From the moment I started the [redacted] community here people have been brigading it trying to suppress it, and had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume. A lot of the users who come to downvote do so with empty no content accounts, but a lot are also trolls from the !fuck_AI@lemmy.world community. I’ve also received a fair amount of harassment including threats and bad faith accusations from it like people saying I’m a pedophile or saying I’m pretending to be nonbinary over the fact that I like and use genAI. Really awful behavior that has no place on this instance of this community.”

-https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/43560521

And so, the only solution is to cast about for random people all over the Lemmyverse (including me, well known hater of all things AI) and send out bans like stray beads of spittle flying from a drunk politician’s mouth. Obviously. It’s the only way to keep us safe.

I feel like it’s a toss-up whether this person is stirring drama on purpose (trying to create “pro-AI” and “anti-AI” camps and instigate disagreements between them), or whether they’ve just got some screws loose and like to paint themselves as the victim of a vast conspiracy and also enjoy using the “ban” button that comes with their UI. IDK. It’s not really that big a deal, honestly, I feel like it could be solved in a day or so with some frank conversations and openness on all sides. I’m not sure why so little energy is going towards that, and why so much energy is going towards deciding which specific strictures we’re going to have the software enforce on all of us going forward and who the enemy needs to be.

Something is weird about it, that’s all I can really say.

There are dozens of us not on Lemmy…

(quokk.au is using Piefed)

“The Last Rung on the Ladder,” “The Mangler,” “Gramma,” “The Raft,” “The Jaunt,” “Graveyard Shift”…

He explained right after when people got salty about it:

Did Epstein traffic young girl? Yes, of course. Is there a client list? Doubtful. Conspiracy fodder.

I’ve actually been deliberately not using the phrasing “client list” for this exact reason. Trump admin people talked about a specific client list, of course, and there were surely multiple lists of people involved in Epstein’s files, but the idea that there is a single master list of “clients,” with people either on it and guilty, or not on it and innocent, is almost certainly false and probably a harmful oversimplification in both directions.

1. Wanting to stir up inter-instance drama on purpose for whatever inscrutable reasons (bringing “neoliberal” into it seems guaranteed to get people excited)
2. Mental illness / need for attention, see also possibility 1

I’m sure that this has nothing to do with possibility 3, a good-faith effort to run an orderly community. Honestly, I just think Lemmy’s model of little fiefdoms where particular people have unlimited power to wield over all the plebs in their little domain is unhealthy for a few different reasons, this type of thing being one of them.

I have no particular place at the table to weigh in on the db0 governance issue. I’m not sure how big a deal it is one way or another (like I said in the other thread people just do weird stuff sometimes). For me I probably would have a chat with the mod and see what their thinking is here, maybe encourage them not to do this anymore because of the extremely low productiveness vs. drama ratio involved with actions like this.

That’s my 2c for what it is worth.

I only noticed because it sent me notifications for it. I guess it is just one weird moderator though, for some reason I thought it was more of a db0 official thing but it looks like it is not.

His old short story collections are absolutely top-notch. “Skeleton Crew” and “Night Shift.” “Different Seasons” is also quite good but doesn’t have the rawness and variety that the shorter stuff has.

Does this actually work on people? Like do you genuinely think telling someone that they’re too dumb/ignorant to participate, that that is effective rhetoric that communicates with others?

Lol I mean being straight with you and responding factually to what you were saying, responding substantively and clarifying, definitely didn’t work. Oh well. Also, “cynical” at least in the original meaning doesn’t mean what you think it means.