this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
104 points (97.3% liked)
Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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97 users here now
This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Posting Guidelines
All posts should follow this basic structure:
- Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
- What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
- Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
- Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
- Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
- Don’t use private communications to prove your point. We can’t verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don’t deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don’t harass mods or brigade comms. Don’t word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin’ in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
- If you are the accused PTB, while you are welcome to respond, please do so within the relevant post.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
YPTB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless Mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
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Sure, it's a bad article that relies on iffy reasoning, but it manages to dress that up enough that I can see why someone might be duped by it. And it hardly seems fair to be this vitriolic about someone being misinformed and enforcing their comm rules when no actually points out what's wrong with what's been posted or links to actual numbers, rather than guesstimations of the article author.
So why is the admin punishing people for not being duped by it? If you're told it's misinformation, and you go out of your way to defend it, then you're not duped. You're part of the misinformation. And an admin using admin powers to support that misinformation is just propoganda.
How is just downvoting something telling someone a post is misinformation? People downvote stuff over the most random crap here. Also, they didn't use admin powers, no site bans were handed out only 3 month comm bans.
Unless you sort by new, a downvote lowers visibility of a post, thus preventing people from being exposed to misinformation. It also frames the article as something most people disapprove of, making it less likely people will believe the article uncritically. Separately, there were comments telling the admin the article was inaccurate, and the admin defended the post.
Please stop going out of your way to defend misinformation.
I definitely would be less ready to accept a post with -15 points at face value, and the post does have comments that point out (some of the) problems with the article. It's rather questionable whether it's worth it to dogpile the post with negative comments, versus just downvoting and moving on.
I mod !uk_politics and I've seen good articles go negative just because people don't find the headline agreeable.
One, downvoting something can be a form of dogpiling and two, the mods clearly want disagreement to be voiced in the comments not through downvotes. This is laid in rules so I don't think this constitutes power tripping behaviour.
I have three news come and see the same thing. Most people don't even read the articles.
I'd prefer disagreement go to the comments, too. I do adjust what I post based on how people engage with it, including downvotes. A rule about mandatory engagement to vote for some communities would be pretty cool, but difficult to implement without some software mechanism.
I don't mod any PieFed communities myself but I believe that PieFed can restrict voting to only subscribed members of a community, which may at least offer some protection against drive-by downvoting from All. See also many other related PieFed features.
I appreciate that. However, I tried piefed and don't agree with many of the features. It's good for the people who like it, just not for me.
That's fine - no software is for literally everyone:-). I am curious, was it the anonymous voting? Bc if so, know that it was abolished already as a failed experiment. I never liked the whole idea of it and spoke out against it from the start.
Fwiw, I HARD believe that consuming Threadiverse content from PieFed definitely takes some getting used to, in comparison to Lemmy - it took me weeks to even begin to feel comfortable, and weeks to months more (not continuous effort:-) to feel like I had optimized it.
On Lemmy I mainly browsed by All, swapping between Hot and New, and blocking communities that did not hold my interest (sports, specific locations, anime, etc.), while on PieFed I haven't subscribed to that many, and blocked virtually nothing. I also spent a heck of a lot less time on the main Subscription page than I did in Lemmy.
Instead I set direct notifications to be sent to me for every new post if the community is small enough, and like I subscribe to barely any news communities so that it does not overwhelm my Subscribed Feed and instead use the Topic areas to scratch that itch, far less than once per day lately. On Lemmy I barely encountered any poetry posts unless I happened to check in New right as it got posted, but in PieFed the Arts and Craft, and if even that gets too much the Arts subtopic separates out photography and craft posts.
So you definitely aren't the only one who found the transition not entirely smooth. And wow, the search function is atrocious right now (by design, as I myself even keep arguing against fixing it, since Lemmy's works so well and even without a login account so it's not so urgent a need for most of us right now, but definitely the main devs are chomping at the bit to work on it, as time allows).
But anyway, it's surely not everyone's cup of tea, and that's cool too. Kudos for giving it a shot. I'm surprised the sign-up wizard alone didn't make you fall absolutely in love with it, from the perspective of let's say a new user thinking about switching over to the Threadiverse from Reddit, and yet the flip side of that is that you most definitely are not in the same position there:-).
Still, I'd be curious to hear what turned you off of it, in case that may help others, or if I should not recommend for certain use cases or some such?
I found the platform pretty streamlined. I've had to learn so many different programs by this age of the internet, I'm willing to take the time to get used to anything.
I use Lemmy for managing my communities, conversations, rare debates, and I browse by subscribed. I have like two bots blocked and that's it, so Lemmy.Today suits my ideal experience, after trying a few instances — the policy is *not to defederate from anyone until they make problems. The core tenants are simple: be civil, no bigotry. Mr. Manager is a helpful, approachable admin.
For piefed, I don't like the flagging of low karma accounts or the automatic instance blocks for .ml, .grad and hexbear(even if you can undo it right away.) I'm not a big fan of subscribing by categories either, and didn't stay long enough to sort that part out. For me, the sign-up wizard was too much like other social media onboarding I'm not a fan of. That kind of sums up my opinion of it: it's more public friendly-feeling and that irks me as a little trashy bitch goblin. I prefer to be thrown in blind where I can hit buttons until I figure it out.
There were things I liked. As an avid decentralist I'm glad there is a Piefed out there, but I prefer my instance for now.
Either way, thanks for taking the time to add some information. I'm sure it'll help folks figure out where they want to be even if it didn't change my mind.
Edit: a word
That's a great description of your experiences, thanks for sharing it, I hope it helps me refine my evangelism, like to know when not to push if someone is not likely to enjoy using PieFed.
If downvoting a bad-faith article is against the rules, they should ban me too!
Like, I’m sure as fuck not going to read every instance/community’s rules to see if I can push the downvote button on bad information.