I’ve been posting in the meme communities in Lemmy for a few months now. For the most part, if I make some silly meme about how broke I am or how bad American healthcare is, it doesn’t get removed and the meme does well. But I’ve had several memes get removed that I was pretty sure don’t violate the rules of the instance or the community and now I’m getting pretty frustrated. In each case, I’ve gone to the modlog and (if there’s any reason given at all) they say that I violated a rule that is written so generally that anything could count as violating it. Meanwhile, a meme about American kids killed in a school shooting makes the top of front page.
Now, if you’ve made it this far, your first reaction is to question whether my posts are crossing the line. But I think all of my memes are pretty light hearted even if they’re about controversial subject matter. Let me give you a few examples.
A few weeks a go I posted a meme with the caption “My wife out-drinking everyone at the table-- Our unborn son:” [picture of Tom the cat in the womb]. I understand abortion is a touchy subject for some people, but it’s not like I was advocating for or against abortion. After that, I posted a meme complaining about the lack of specificity of the rules on Lemmy and that post also got removed. That’s enough to let me know that the mods on that instance (lemmy.ml) will delete anything they disagree with. But I’m sure that a meme about killing the rich 1% with guillotines would stay up no problem.
I know what your thinking: Lemmy is a big place, just post on a different instance. And I thought the same thing. I went over to [email protected] thinking that if they’re allowing shitposts, then they would have a more lax mod policy. Post a few memes about innocuous things, it goes fine. Then I post a meme that pokes fun at the LGBTQIA+ acronym for being too long and that gets removed too. So I’m coming to the realization that any post that is completely innocuous or anodyne to the mods is fine, but if you even touch on certain subjects (e.g., miscarriages, queer culture, Lemmy’s rules, etc) it will get taken down.
Strong moderation is the only thing that keeps a community a community. A good community is a community that says, “No, you and your content are not welcome.”
The lack of that is why platforms like Twitter fail at creating community, just an amalgamation of people throwing their shit into a worldwide circlejerk.
What I’m trying to say is that moderators do not serve your they don’t need to really give reasons or be consistent. They shape the community they Foster.
If your content is removed, find a community that accepts you, because the communities you found do not.
I’m going to respectfully disagree; we should not leave things entirely up to the mods. The rules should be clear about what is or isn’t allowed in the community. Having vague rules that leave it up to mod discretion is a recipe for the mods to take things down for arbitrary reasons (e.g., a liberal mod taking down anything conservative). It is clear to me that this is already happening, because I made a meme complaining about the rules and that was also removed.
I’m happy to let mods carve out a bunch of niche communities with their own preferences. The fediverse is a big place. If you don’t like instances that are protective of LGBT+ folks you’re cutting it down a bit, but genuinely, you seem to be deliberately picking topics that troll the specific community you’re posting on, then you complained that they took it down. Post where your post will be welcome, stop complaining when you post where you already know it’s not. Reddit and twitter are pretty right wing and troll friendly. Maybe you’ll be happier there.
I hesitate to do this because I don’t want to get the post removed, but here are the memes that were taken down. Judge for yourself if they’re bigoted or as light-hearted as I think they are: https://imgur.com/a/8oNroeo
Anyone who is offended by these needs to calm down and remember that it’s ok to not take everything so seriously.
None of these are hateful in any way. The one about mods definitely has some targeted sass to it, but that’s pretty light.