tl;dr - Please don’t bring personal attacks from the recent lemmy.ml drama into this community including badmouthing instance admins. Let’s just look forward and build something positive here. I plan on taking moderator action within the comments of this post if I see things that cross the (admittedly subjective) line into being too negative. Thank you everybody for your cooperation!


I had been trying to avoid bringing this topic up at all in this community as I want to just focus on building a community here centered around a mutual love and respect for a form of entertainment. However, humans being humans, when you get enough together in one space, there are going to be tensions. Over the past couple days, those tensions have come to a head over on the /c/anime community of lemmy.ml. So, I wanted to try to get in front of things in this community and do two things:

  1. Clearly try to set expectations about what is or is not acceptable in the ensuing discussion
  2. Provide a single place (this thread) in which people can talk about it.

Summary of recent events

For those out of the loop, there is a bit of history between lemmy.ml instance admins and the ani.social instance, even spreading onto github. Recently, on the lemmy.ml /c/anime community, there has been a series of post/comment removals that were being performed by instance admins rather than community moderators, in which mention of or linking out to the ani.social instance was getting that content removed. The following discussion heated up and resulted in the admins asking for new moderators of the community and banning at least one of the existing mods from the instance. The community for the time being has been set to only allow posts by moderators. It has since been reopened.

Expectations going forward and in this thread

Going forward, in this community, I would like to see these events discussed in a way that is not overly negative. I want to be clear that I am not trying to stifle discussion about this topic if people want to discuss the events that have happened, but please avoid things like personal attacks or namecalling of other humans/communities/instances. I am going to try to keep a close eye on discussions about this topic and will perhaps be a little more liberal with moderator action than I have been in the past. What I don’t want to have happen is that this community becomes bitter refugees from a falling out that happened on another instance.

So, with all of that said, I hope that we can work together to build a community in which we can all share in the love that we have for our favorite shows, or the ire that we have for our least favorite shows. Arguments about what the end of Evangelion really meant are way more fun anyway.

I am pinning this thread for now for visibility and will be removing other threads people make about this topic for the time being. Please remember to be civil.

Edit: I have unpinned this thread. However, future discussions about this topic are still subject to these civility rules. Thanks all!

  • ram@bookwormstory.social
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    6 months ago

    Turns out I’d forgotten to sub to this community, even after I’d added it to the sidebar of anime.ml. The two remaining moderators there are pretty inactive so it’s right of those admins to be looking for new volunteers. Sorry that this ends up impacting everyone else; I tried to stay out of the drama myself, but I wasn’t willing to moderate the way they wanted me to.

    The fact that we can have a different community to use is one of the beautiful things about the fediverse, and why I personally believe so strongly in it. I

    Anyways, I hope everyone finds this community just fine, and I look forward to many discussions and to talking about anime over here.

    • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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      6 months ago

      I hope everyone finds this community just fine

      I think that discoverability is probably the biggest hurdle for new communities on the fediverse. I don’t know what the solution is really, but getting found by new users is really tough.

      • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Besides join-lemmy.org, this community is present on both Lemmy Community-Browser and Lemmy Explorer - two main sites I tend to link to anytime someone asks for a way to find new communities. There’re also links between communities with cross-posted threads which should also help with discoverability.

        I feel like focusing on building a fun and welcoming community with user base interested in spreading the word is the best approach at the moment - all in all, it’s still relatively early days of reddit-like part of fediverse. There will be plenty of time and opportunities to grow.

        Hell, I’m one of the people who stumbled on this instance by accident and eventually decided to make in my main hub for anime & manga related discussion.

        I’m not a model user however, as I tend to go community hunting for fun from time to time so that that as you will.

      • ReluctantZen@feddit.nl
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        6 months ago

        Yeah, the only reason I knew of ani.social was because I saw people of that instance commenting on the anime and manga communities of .ml and .world back before the defederation.

      • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        It really is, suppression aside. I only joined the anime community on ml because it was at the top of the community search with the largest number of subscribers at the time I created my account. I don’t even remember seeing ani.social anywhere on the list, and after I subscribed I never did another search to subscribe to another anime community.

        • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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          6 months ago

          That is a good idea that I hadn’t thought of. Our community isn’t exactly new, but there is likely a new group of users looking for a community like this one at the moment. I will take a look when I get a chance in the next day or two.

    • zabadoh@ani.social
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      5 months ago

      Today I noticed the links in the sidebar in .ml are gone now.

      It was glorious while it lasted.

      Thanks for your service!

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Badmins will be badmins (and while whether they are “bad” people/ instance admins is subjective as they admin a more general instance, their treatment of ani.social and c/anime on the ml instance make it pretty clear that they are bad admins for anime related communities).

    I am glad to have moved over here and I certainly look forward to the hopefully more active, hopefully growingly populated space.

    Also, all endings of Evangelion are valid. Even the Mari ending.

    • MomoTimeToDie@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Imo the biggest issue is that they aren’t just bad admins on a random big instance, it’s the lemmy devs and their “main” instance (remember, they also run lemmygrad). As a result, them being bad admins is a lot more concerning

  • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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    6 months ago

    Alright gang, I had a nice nap on the train ride home, got some exercise, had a lot of tasty curry, and I still haven’t had to reach for the mod mallet at all from this. I wasn’t kidding in my post when I said I was hesitant to bring this up at all in this community because I was nervous that it would just be inviting the very negativity I was trying to avoid. However, everybody has been very well behaved so far and I am incredibly grateful. I am probably going to leave this pinned for ~24 hours total before unpinning. I don’t want to dwell on the situation, but I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t happening either.

    A bit of my personal background is that I have never modded a community like this before either on reddit, discord, or anything else. Over my 11 years on reddit (and digg before that), I have mostly been a lurker. So, I just want to thank everybody for making my modding life easy by being great users!

  • 0x0@social.rocketsfall.net
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    6 months ago

    I’m with you 100%. Hopefully more admin overreach will push users off the offending instance in question and remove it from relevancy.

    • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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      4 months ago

      They removed a post asking about Nisekoi 3h ago so ypu are likely right.

      Not that it really matters, the community over there is practically dead already if you look at regular episode threads

  • Rottcodd@ani.social
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    6 months ago

    My approach to the matter has been very simple and straightforward - I have nothing at all to do with any of the .ml communities. I never even set foot in any of them. And I heartily recommend that others do the same - just pretend that the .ml communities don’t exist and focus entirely on this instance and its vastly superior communities.

    Time is on our side. These communities are simply better, in all possible ways, so all we really have to do is keep doing what we do here, completely ignore .ml, and be patient.

    • ram@bookwormstory.social
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      6 months ago

      I think .ml’s fine for certain types of communities.

      It’s simply that their perception of anime and sexualization therewithin is at odds with the anime community’s perception of sexualization. I think there’s some merit - the anime community is host to a lot of people and art that I’m morally opposed to myself, I simply believe that .ml’s looking at the benign and edgy and painting it with the same brush as the abhorrent and gross.

      Just my 2 cents on the matter ^^

  • Tamlyn@lemmy.zip
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    6 months ago

    I think anime or anime like content has a better home here or other instances than on lemmy.ml. So i’m anyways not follow most communities there anymore (only the lemmy community). I’m not from ani.social, but i like it here, so that’s everything that matter. And they don’t won’t me to be there.

  • Lvxferre@ani.social
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    6 months ago

    I’m a bit late because of a few things. One of them was to let my head cool a bit, as I was in one of the mentioned threads; the other was that, once I decided to move out of lemmy.ml, I had to move a community to another instance that was undergoing update.

    Let’s just look forward and build something positive here.

    Speaking on that. Do you guys need a new janny? I do it for free!

    Seriously, I’m willing to mod a few comms for this instance, as long as they don’t involve ecchi. So if you guys need help, please let me know.

    • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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      6 months ago

      For now, the best thing we can do is to help build the community through engagement. Things like commenting on posts, voting, reporting rule violations, and creating posts are all helpful. Since we have revived this community after the initial defederation, the single thing that has brought the biggest boost in users/awareness were the series of discussion posts that @Itte@sh.itjust.works made (sort this community by most comments and you will see them).

      I was giving some thought to that when they were making the posts and I think that because Lemmy has a default sort of Active, it places a lot of weight on recent comments when it is creating a user’s frontpage. So, those kinds of posts in which many comments are being made keep them high in the rankings so that people that view their instance’s “All” page are more likely to see it and discover this community.

      So far, the moderation workload has been light (thanks everybody!), so it hasn’t been a big issue. There is always the option of creating your own community, perhaps relating to a show you want to see more content about and then modding that. If the community continues to grow and more moderator action is needed, then hitagi and I will make the call for them. I think it would be especially nice if needed to find a moderator in a different timezone than the two of us.

      • Itte@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        I was afraid of spamming the community so I kinda stopped for a while but I can make those posts again when I think of new questions

        • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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          6 months ago

          No worries. I didn’t want to pressure you, just provide a concrete example of the type of activity that drives engagement. I think that if we try to force it, it won’t be nearly as effective as just letting these kinds of discussions grow organically.

      • Lvxferre@ani.social
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        6 months ago

        Glad to know that the workload has been light. Lemmy folks are surprisingly reasonable.

        I’ll probably create a new comm or two then. For engagement I’ve been creating a few manual threads for episodes that bot-kun didn’t pick, and commenting in anime episode threads for series that I’ve watched, but it’s great to know that open-ended discussion threads go well here. I want this instance to thrive, as if it was the protag of some “kicked out of the party” story.

    • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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      6 months ago

      Yeah, I know I am a bit more involved in this situation than most others since I am a moderator, but I have been super bummed about the whole thing. Part of me was holding out hope that there could be a future refederation and that the two communities could jointly celebrate with like a group watch or something.

      Alas…

      • alphacyberranger@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        So true, sometimes I wonder why can’t people come together for something they like . Now what’s worse is all the users in the previous community need to get the memo that we shifted to here and only then we’ll have more activity here.

  • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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    4 months ago

    Late to this party (partly because I just found this post) but I was interested how this story developed since I originally made the post calling out the content removal.

    As it turns out calling out admins/mods for removing content is Doxxing. That’s right, commenting the Display and/or Username of a mod is grounds for having your comment removed for “doxxing”. (Which btw is very available information given how lemmy federates that info)

    With that being a thing I am even more convinced doing this was the right thing.

    • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, I never got the doxxing thing. It is information that is available to anybody that can run a docker compose file for their own instance. There should be no expectation of privacy when it comes to moderator actions.

      I just now checked the modlog over there out of curiosity and they removed a discussion post about Nisekoi for reason “pedo” despite it seeming like a perfectly normal discussion thread (I host an instance for bot testing, so I can still see the thread). I mean, what the hell is going on over there?

    • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      I just found out myself. Glad I made it over here before any helpful comments were removed.

      I like Lemmy, but man some of those older instances are a little too into their distinct ideology.

  • wjs018@ani.socialOPM
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    5 months ago

    Just a quick meta update here. Not meant to stir things up, but thought it was funny. Out of curiosity, I checked the modlog of the ml community again, and it seems like they removed a recent PV and a top 10 anime of the week chart for breaking the instance rule 3 (no porn). This is despite both of them being very much not nsfw.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯