Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
Something 72T mentioned in their selfcrit
How exactly do we know this about the joining part? And how much of “site culture” is being misconstrued by liberals on other parts of lemmy? It’s no secret that other lemmy instances lie like anything else about here.
the things that stop me telling people to come here are not the dunk tanks or that type of culture. this being such an insular place with an often defensive mindset does a lot more to removedoff new people who don't know the party line* yet does a lot more than 'they shit on random nazis'
*I do not mean liberals and bigots, I mean leftists. ofc there's no place for scum here
Eliminating this unwelcoming insularity and hostility between users is a primary goal of the ongoing community changes we're working on here.
I want this to be a welcoming place for leftists of all stripes to come shitpost, hang out, and feel safe in a like-minded community.
I was just suggesting sending automated welcome messages to new users to try to onboard them.
That's a good idea. ~~I'm gonna look into it and see if there's a way to do this with Lemmy currently!~~
Actually, it's not possible in base Lemmy. A bot could be made to do this if someone develops it. Unfortunately I don't know how to make one.
I think it'd be a good feature to have but idk if lemmy's devs would rather have bots do it instead, someone could open an issue and see what they think.
If the mod/admin team thinks it's a good idea, make a post about it and maybe someone will step up and make the bot.
I know I keep saying someone should do this and that
but I have no idea how to make a bot and I don't have a github account.