I have been uploading comic art images by Moebius for several weeks almost daily to the !eurographicnovels@lemm.ee community, where I´m a moderator myself. All those images have disappeared. Modlog says the images have been deleted by "admin". Modlog gives no reason for this but says the images were later restored by "admin" but that is not true. All my comic art posts have been destroyed and are empty posts now. I was not even contacted a single time about this and honestly can´t think of a reason because I had uploaded exclusively "safe for work" and apolitical material. We are trying to build a community for european graphic novels like "Tintin", "Lucky Luke" and "The Incal" and I put a lot of love in those posts because I want to help make our community interesting and grow. However - I have been stongly discouraged to contribute content now that I have seen it gets arbitrarily wiped by anonymus admins. How can I find out what happened, who deleted my stuff and why they did so? How can I avoid this happeing to my posts in the future?
Unfortunately, we have no mechanism to prevent bad Instance admins from engaging in bad practices, afaik. People just need to spread the word that that particular Instance might have some bad policies going on, so others can make more informed decisions.
It's an inherent challenge to decentralization though. If anyone can make an Instance, then how can you verify that the Instance you were putting your community on was run by trustworthy, reliable people? In these early stages especially, when nobody has known anyone else for very long.
All that said, I am still hoping this is some kind of innocent mistake or technical bug. But I am completely unable to say. I do know a fair bit about Lemmy, but I'm not a self-hoster or other expert user that might know the ins and outs of the back end.
Right, and I feel like that's a big part of what OP is doing here. I think we just have to let the reputational dust settle and go with that flow.
What I'm also concerned about is what kind of failsafe the big instances have. For example, if something happened to my instance-runner and the place went down, federation would only help so much. So altho the content would be preserved, all those communities would be dead in the water, and their subscribers lost. That would be a terrible blow after months or even years of building them up, plus providing content, which is what I've been doing steadily for two months now at my place. If I had to start over at another instance, I don't think I'd have the heart, even though I've tried to locally archive everything, including a good chunk of the reviews I write by hand.
Yup, hopefully. On the surface it's a disastrous one, and the admin I'm talking to has put in a ticket, at the least. But it's turning in to a good bit of hard work we didn't need to manually restore some of the lost image content. Most of the content is gone however, despite the posts being restored.
Whole situation bloody well sucks, and wasn't helped by my colleague OP receiving no communication or explanation of any kind. AFAIK they *still* haven't been contacted, so we're talking at least two major failures on the part of LW.
When dealing with a volunteer project, even a large one, I would allow multiple days for communication.
They do not have a staff and structure like a company would, so we cannot hold them to the same standards, that is not reasonable.
We're probably always going to get fairly bad customer support here, most likely. Unless they start charging a fee or putting in a lot of ads or something.
edit: Simply due to how massively outnumbered they are by us random internet denizens and our abilities to find and cause problems.
I understand and agree with those things, but disagree that OP's situation fits that kind of model. No, in this case it was a slew of LW failures that I should think would drive most victims away, no matter the setting.
Consider:
Understanding and excusing part of that due to the volunteer nature of LW is one thing, but IMO this is a next-level clusterfluff.
Indeed, I understand that LW previously put a lot of effort in to attracting Rexxiters, to some degree at the expense of other instances, and maybe this is what it looks like when there isn't enough staff & process to handle the magnitude of userbase the instance runners desired. Maybe that's something to consider as well, when volunteers sign up for a project.
I do not think it is wise to consider more things until we have more perspectives on what happened. Is any of this time sensitive, and requires to be addressed today?
We can only construct our working conclusions based on the known information, which is what I'm doing.
Yes, and there *is* a time-sensitive nature to this stuff that needs to be quickly addressed, starting with the amount of repairs my mod and I will need to coordinate on in order for our sub not to look like a hot mess. Unfortunately, him being in a very different time zone means there's almost nothing I can do until tomorrow morning.
This would make little difference if the community had low presence and activity, but we now have almost 300 subscribers, are growing fairly quickly by Lemmy standards, and are in the presence of 'getting the word out.'
I understand your perspective and your seemingly benign intent, but frankly, you're not helping. Just like instance runners and their staff, we are ALSO volunteers, aiming to serve and support our userbase, as well as doing our part to help make the Fediverse a viable Reddit-alternative. We've been working hard on this project, and have every right to feel aggrieved for the stated reasons.
Feel free to have the last reply if you like, but again-- you're not helping here, and I don't plan on responding further. Good day.
Quite alright. I'm just trying to control the degree of finger-pointing until we have more information. However we may feel, there is only so much we can realistically accomplish with the resources at our disposal.
Well, ten days later and none of the images were restored, no LW staff ever responded further to either of us, and no new information came along to explain the clusterfluff.
Compare that to the speedy, excellent responses and service of my own instance staff, and there's just no way I could honestly recommend LW. Indeed, nothing has changed to indicate that any other user here might not randomly get temp-banned and their uploads wiped.
FYI-- your refrain of 'let's not jump to any rash conclusions' was in the end useless, and even detrimental, since patience availed us nothing, and we're still trying to clean up the mess over on our sub/community.
Detrimental? In what way?