How would the users message mods directly when the modlog just says “mod”? They could message each one directly, or mass spam all at once, but in general the tools are highly biased to protect mods rather than grant power to the content creators.

On Reddit - which I haven’t used since practically the Rexodus so am definitely not shilling for it here - after a post is removed, people can still continue to discuss things in it. So if I typed a long reply to someone it would still make its way to them. Here, it’s just poof gone, and a whole long response, possibly not even to OP but to someone else, I can’t even send it anymore. All of those discussions that the OP spawned - they are all just gone. Nor can I look them up later if I have the URL - the entire post is gone, not simply removed from the community listing of posts but taken away from the community entirely, all of the work put in, by The People, removed from them by a possibly capricious mod. With no recourse to do much of anything except complain.

I already mentioned how the admins have more freedom yes, so I am talking here strictly below that level, the interactions between mods and content creators.

Remember the context of this thread is me responding to “People still wonder why Lemmy has a bad reputation even in the entire Fediverse…” So my purpose is not to whinge but to discuss practical solutions to improving that reputation. Putting the power back into the hands of The People rather than mods would go a LONG way. Like, even just sending a notification upon removal of a post or comment - there is much that Reddit does that if we did, would help. Or perhaps we can find even better solutions, but not if we don’t even so much as try.

Also, even if you did become your own instance admin, that does next to nothing for you if you still want to interact with people on other instances - it allows you to create your own communities on your own instance, but if you want to make comments on OTHER communities on OTHER instances, then everything that I said above still holds true - you still don’t get a notification if your content is removed, you still can’t continue conversations or even so much as view posts that have been removed, etc. Looking at the moderation practices of the Lemmy developers used on Lemmy.ml explains so much of why admins and mods have so much power, but the individual posters have so little. In some ways

Reddit is more authoritian - at the top - but in other ways we are even more so here than there. We need to do better. I doubt that we will, but we should. Although we won’t unfortunately, which means that people will remain on Reddit. Especially the ones who already seem okay with spez - to them, there seems not much to entice them to come here, for an objectively worse experience, for someone who doesn’t want to put in the effort to learn how federation works much less to host their own instance? At which point we seem to me to be deluding ourselves - “People still wonder why Lemmy has a bad reputation even in the entire Fediverse…”, bc we are not honest about who and what we are. e.g. we may be Linux users and self-hosters, who nonetheless still have fewer rights in some ways than we did on Reddit. Which we were fine with bc the software is still being developed but… how long has it been since the Rexodus, and we have seen little improvements made in some of these areas? And in this particular area, actual negative progress made bc the modlog used to say the name of the account of who removed something, whereas now it just says “mod” - which would be fine if there were a modmail, but again, there isn’t.

I am not counting negative progress as “progress”. And I am losing all hope for Lemmy to ever improve in these regards yes - in fact I no longer recommend it to anyone, ever, bc I’ve been burned far too often on that in the past. I do still hold out strong hopes for the Fediverse tools though - Mbin, PieFed, and possibly Sublinks all show much promise for the Threadiverse (or whatever name for forum-based Fediverse). One day far from now Lemmy will remain the tankie Threadiverse, and people won’t be dependent upon having to choose between just Reddit vs. it, bc there will finally be other options, and people will begin to be more free. And before you argue back: yes, it was thanks to Lemmy that got us here (or more to Kbin for me and so many others). But that is no reason to not seek to continue to improve by putting power into the hands of The People, even if Lemmy is not willing or even if it wants to head in the exact opposite direction.

Reaction? If you see a simple question in a shitposting community, with the image of a fashion choice that is unconventional, and think “Hmm should I interpret this as a question about fashion as he asked, or should I interpret this as he’s a rapist and trying to be clever about it”, if you default to thinking that the other person is obviously a rapist (as you seem to have, saying that I’m seeking plausible deniability and try to associate me with Musk and trying to be clever with rape lol), then holy fuck, and frankly that’s on you. That was your reaction. Like you have to really out there to default to “he’s obviously a rapist”. You need to be better.

Honestly this is the perfect example of how Lemmy has a ravenous need to misinterpret. You just did it yourself.

Can they not see you? Or is it just piracy stuff