At the end of Chapter 3 of Foundations of Lemmy, we discussed how defederation could affect how accessible other communities and instances are to your main account. If one instance decides to “defederate” (or block) another, large portions of Lemmy are no longer accessible to you. If you’d like to learn more about this and other things to consider when aiming for a workable single Lemmy account experience, I highly recommend checking out Chapter 3.
Both moderators and administrators have a fair bit of power over users, even if certain admins and moderators complain that they do not have enough. For example, administrators can ban you or delete your account, but they can also control the federated content you see in more ways than one. Moderators also have numerous actions available to them, as they can remove comments, ban users from communities, and lock posts, to name a few. If you’re familiar with Reddit, this probably isn’t a huge surprise. In Chapter 1, we mentioned how moderators are roughly equivalent to subreddit moderators on Reddit. Likewise, administrators on each Lemmy instance are akin to the admins Reddit hires to do their dirty work. Much like on Reddit, admins have total and complete control over their own instance, and can do quite a lot to influence their user’s experience in browsing federated content, how local communities are operated, and who gets to create accounts and communities. They can also assign other people to moderator and administrator permission levels and can also take away those roles at any time.
The Nitty-gritty of Moderation Actions
As stated above, moderators and administrators wield a great deal of power over users. While the figure below isn’t a complete list of all possible actions server staff can take, it will give you a general overview of who can do what.
| Action | Result | Permission Level |
|---|---|---|
| Lock | Prevents new comments from being submitted underneath a particular post | Moderator |
| Community pin | Pins a particular post to the top of a single community | Moderator |
| Local pin | Pins a particular post to the top of the entire instance | Administrator |
| Remove | Delete a particular post | Moderator |
| Community ban | Ban a user from a single community as opposed to the entire instance | Moderator |
| Instance-wide ban | Ban a user from the entire instance | Administrator |
| Purge user | Similar to an instance-wide ban, but will irreversibly delete the account | Administrator |
| Purge post or comment | Used to irreversibly delete a post and attached media | Administrator |
| Appoint as mod | Add a user to a community’s moderation team | Moderator |
| Appoint as admin | Add a user to an instance’s administration team | Administrator |
Chart based on this piece of official documentation.
Administrators also have several additional settings that can influence how users experience Lemmy as a whole. As we’ve stated before, administrators can “defederate” (block) certain instances if they choose, effectively walling off sections of the Lemmy federation from users on both sides. If they wanted, they could also disable federation entirely, although this is something I imagine most choosing to avoid (for obvious reasons).
Here are the administration settings for federation.
Administrators can also do things like enable or disable downvotes, change protections for new accounts, and create regex (regular expressions) to filter for certain keywords. I don’t imagine much of this is a surprise, but it’s probably worth sharing regardless.
Here are another large chunk of the options available to administrators.
There isn’t much more interesting to share in the admin panel besides some fairly dry settings related to technical constraints and a few settings that allow you to customize things like taglines, server branding, and the sidebar. All in all, it’s pretty clear administrators have a fair bit of power over users. As an end-user, it would be in your best interest to join an instance with a track record of respecting users and setting clear boundaries.
Overall, that was a quick look at some of the settings moderators and administrators have access to. I feel like this covers basically everything of importance to an end-user and also highlights why it’s important to find a decent instance for your Lemmy account.
When I’m finished with the next chapter, I’ll add a link here.
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