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).
@joepie91 Counterpoint: the mods need to be sufficiently transparent and open so that work can be done.
I once had a Community Working Group lead tell me, after they expelled someone very popular on seemingly flimsy grounds to heavy backlash, "there's more going on you don't know."
The tell us! Something. Anything. If you actively hide info, people will fill it in with their least charitable imagination.
Privacy should be protected, but give *something*.
@Crell I would broadly agree with that; with the caveat that there's a big difference between "some details on why they were banned" and "an exhaustive justification to the satisfaction of the listener".
The former is definitely a reasonable thing to expect (and, IMO, crucially important to teach communities to do more self-regulation too), but the latter is not, because that is where the "expertise and context needed to fully understand the conclusion" comes in.
@joepie91 Oh, absolutely. It's a non-trivial balancing act, both for the mods and the community.