I don’t like to butt in on the moderation happenings on another instance, but since people on my instances are now getting involved, I feel I have to. Hachyderm’s mod team removed a post from one of their members, believing it to be incorrect information after it was reported to them as being incorrect information. The person whose post was removed got upset and that has caused a bit of a firestorm response. @quintessence has been trying to answer questions but I want to add some context as a fellow admin/moderator.

The first thing to know is that moderators are not perfect. We make mistakes. I make them all the time, as some of you will no doubt recognize. Like Hachyderm, when anything goes awry, moderation-wise, it is our job to stand in front and take the heat from whatever went wrong. We DO. NOT. throw the mod team under the bus, assuming the moderators are acting in good faith.

The next thing to understand is that this is a thankless job. People get mad at us for taking action, for not taking action, for being too fast, for being too slow, for permitting something someone thinks should be blocked, and for blocking things someone thinks should be permitted. We see some awful shit. We get threats of harm. We get doxed. We get angry letters from lawyers.

We also don’t have a team of fact checkers at the ready. We generally process dozens of reports per day. We have to apply a reasonableness test to incoming reports and respond based on the rules and guidelines we’ve set for our community and then move on, and if we made a mistake, we go and fix it.

I would ask that y’all afford some grace and understanding to the Hachyderm team and to the admins and moderators of fediverse instances generally. We aren’t the enemy. We are trying our best to manage a community at a time of unprecedented levels of tornadic bullshit, fear, anger, and hate.

Peace.