Ask Lemmy

I dropped 95% of my activity on Reddit about when everyone else left earlier this summer.

This is not censorship but it's similar, it's the problems with Reddit's automated moderation system. It's not something unique to Reddit since lots of platforms have this issue, and it is a risk on Lemmy as well if we can't figure out other ways to combat spam effectively once userbase grows

• On Reddit, our university sub's moderation team had nearly all of their accounts banned (including all the alts), because we shared a mod account to do basic mod actions (before Reddit had some of that functionality built-in). The mod account wasn't the reason, but we assume that's what the automated system used to decide we were all one person. It took a while to resolve, and our initial attempts to point out the issue resulted in automated messages saying we were wrong and that we couldn't appeal anymore. Eventually we posted on mod-support and the only solution was to self-dox our alts to each other in order to get some of them reverted (the ones we didn't feel comfortable sharing we never got back). It was a mess.

I think we also need to consider the flip side of this issue. Yes, some people are banned wrongfully from these platforms. However, sometimes people are banned for sharing content that also isn't welcome here, and over time we WILL get more users like that showing up here because Lemmy will look like the next best thing for them. I'm not sure how that will work out and maybe the Fediverse will let those users find their place away from the rest of us, but it's important to know that not all bans from other platforms are unjustified.