Hey all — just launched openmic.social, a general-purpose Lemmy instance with a specific mission: open discourse + transparent, restorative moderation.

The pitch is simple — anyone can grab the mic — and the thing that makes us different is what happens when you cross a line:

No shadowbans, ever. If your post is removed or your account is actioned, you're told — what happened, which rule, and how to fix it.
We help before we punish. A heads-up and a path back come before a ban. Bans are the last resort, not the first reflex.
Moderation in the open. Every call is appealable, publicly, in our !meta community.
Hard lines only: nothing illegal, no targeted harassment, no doxxing, no spam. That's what keeps the mic open for everyone.

We're brand new, which means early adopters shape the culture. Come introduce yourself, bring a community that needs a home, or start one — I'll help you set it up and mod it.

🎤 https://openmic.social/

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 7 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Lemmy most definitely has shadowbans, but they are applied at the level of whole entire communities rather than end-users. I remember being on the StarTrek.Website instance when that functionality was added to the Lemmy code, and discussing with someone my finding out that ChapoTrapHouse was no longer accessible from it, despite the fact the instance remained federated. No announcement of that fact was ever made iirc, it's just that one day poof the behavior has changed, after Lemmy deployed a version that allowed for that.

Some few instances are very open about their hiding of communities - see e.g. https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/, listing in detail every one - but most are not, and the Lemmy UI has nothing at all like the list that it shows for (de)federations.

The Lemmy admins also can remove people even from the modlogs, in cases of severe abuse. Tbf it's exceedingly rare and there is little evidence of this being abused (well there was one time, but the excuse that it was due to a bug seemed believable to me and most everyone else - Lemmy.ml quite often tests new versions of the code before they get rolled out to the rest of the Threadiverse, which is quite helpful actually).

Lemmy also fails to notify someone of their having been moderated. The various communities are FULL of stories of people asking where their posts went, or why they can no longer post to a community, or stating their discovery that they have an event in the modlog. The notification of moderation activities is exceedingly poor on the Lemmy platform.

Sadly, Reddit does a much better job at notification of an event, and also provides for a modmail to communicate with the mods to discuss the situation, e.g. to ask why, rather than leaving it to the end-user to wonder if they should DM each one listed in sequence until they find one that is even active much less responsive...

Lemmy is imperfect. At least Huffman is not in charge here, but conversely the tools have aways to go before we catch up even to what Reddit offers.