moderation, kind of meta but more general
A shocking amount of people really needs to learn that a lot of bans/defederations/whatever are not handed out for specific directly-observable behaviour, but for the offender's active refusal to reflect or reconsider when approached about it.
This is true for defederations on fedi, but it is very much also true for community management more broadly.
Most moderators do not act impulsively. If someone got banned somewhere, and they're telling you that "all they did is <innocent sounding thing>", then the reality is that *they are probably lying*, and there was actually a whole conversation (or multiple) where they were asked to stop doing the thing and they trivialized it or actively refused.
That doesn't mean that every moderation action is always justified. But it *does* mean that if you want to question the legitimacy of a moderation action, you actually need to do the work of understanding the full context and not just go off whatever the banned person claims (nor just what's in the public logs).
moderation, kind of meta but more general
@joepie91 I've done moderation on irc and forums, so I know this is often true. If anything typically a ban results from a threshold being crossed after a lot of nonsense. On the other hand, I've done moderation on irc and forums so I know it's not unusual that some interpersonal conflict or difference of opinion can also result in moderation action. It's really hard to tell from the outside, and I'm not sure to what extent transparency can be achieved withouth compromising other moderation desiderata.
re: moderation, kind of meta but more general
@modulux When I moderate a place, I tend to be extremely transparent about what led up to something - in the more complex cases, I have sometimes spent literal hours explaining the rationale to community members, and basically turned it into a community management class (with good results - this resulted in better self-moderation of the community over time as well, as people learned to spot abusive patterns early).
Unfortunately the tradeoff for that is that it requires a lot of time and energy, and not everybody can afford to spend that on it...
re: moderation, kind of meta but more general
@joepie91 That's a good thing, but it can be very hard. As you say, limited time, limited resources. And sometimes thrashing over the decision just stirs things more and creates more friction, at least that was my experience, to the point in some places I was meta-talk was explicitly banned.