Hey all,
In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.
We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we’ve done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.
ToS Additions
That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.
Regarding misinformation, we’ve tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:
- Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
- We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
- When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
- Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
- Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
- Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.
We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.
We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.
By-laws Addition
We’ve also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.
This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we’ve created as a result of what has happened over the last week.
Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.
https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation
https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT:
We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.
EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):
We’ve posted a response, sorry for the delay.
👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈
Respectfully, I believe this incident serves more as a learning opportunity for the admin team rather than a reason to amend the rules.
This isn’t the first time I’ve observed Rooki acting inappropriately for an admin of a community. As an admin of a (admittedly much smaller) corner of the internet, I’ve learned to interact with users in a way that is polite and ensures they feel safe and heard. This is at least the second instance where I’ve seen Rooki respond emotionally and rather adversarially towards users, which has, in my view, undermined their credibility, to the point that I hope to avoid future interactions with them.
I understand that managing LW, one of the largest and general-purpose instances, especially with Lemmy’s still rather limited moderation tools, is challenging, and I appreciate the hard work all of you, including Rooki, put into maintaining it and making it run as smoothly as it does. I’m NOT asking for their removal; however, considering that this is not the first time I’ve seen Rooki behave uncivilly and antagonistically towards users, I hope that this will be a formative experience for them.
(Edit for clarity)
Just want to pitch in as an outsider that I too have experienced Rooki acting inappropriately and frankly immaturely. This has happened multiple times and it doesn’t give a good light to the rest of the Lemmy.world administration that they seemingly tolerate Rookis behaviour. It’s not up to me, especially as I am not even a lemmy.world user, but in my opinion Rooki should not be an admin following these incidents.
I’ve experienced Rooki acting inappropriately and immaturely as well. This recent incident is part of a pattern of behavior.
Thank you for this comment.
I’ve interacted with Rooki a few times, most of them were nice, but I’ve also seen Rooki being indeed unicivilly and antagonistically towards users.
Let’s see what the update brings.
Thank you for being understanding about it 🙏
If you won’t admit Rookie made a mistake then it makes the whole site/team look bad.
Amending the rules puts out a message of: “we were right the whole time but you all just didnt understand it”.
This is a bit learning the wrong lesson from what happened, isn’t it? The problem is admin overreach. There was some disagreement on a sub, no big deal. I don’t even care what it’s about, I have no opinion on it. But now this admin comes in like Eric Cartman “Respect mah authoritah!”. What am I supposed to make of that? Nobody was advocating animal abuse. I worry about admins who can’t just let something go, who can’t handle disagreement, like a cop always looking to escalate.
So thanks for the rules clarification, I guess, but what about:
- won’t this general guideline of ‘do no harm’ stifle discussion in case it isn’t clear which is the harmful position? For example covid
- is there a process in place when an admin does something in the heat of the moment, that the admin team can let them cool off for a bit?
- is removing mods going to be the norm?
- will there be more rules when another admin disagrees with a mod?
- why was this escalated like this? Don’t you think removing mod status is an overreaction (procedure wise)?
- does the ‘anti animal abuse’ statute apply to animal consumption and animal products? Vegan community has a point there
- what about rooki?
All in all, please don’t kill this instance by telling people what to think. There is healthy discussion and people don’t always have to agree. That doesn’t make me a ‘free speech absolutist’. I think removing moderator privileges was quite out of bounds. Again, nobody was advocating animal abuse at all.
Mods and admins are here to keep discussion healthy, not impose their views on everyone else, right? So don’t! And don’t cover for others who do!
I never saw the thread, but based on what I’m hearing, it’s animal abuse.
If you look at Reddit and Facebook they’ve both been mostly consumed by anti science communities which put people in real danger
We see communities like this create an echo chamber which grows and make it impossible to argue sanely.
The fact is, I have seen some increasingly toxicity in some vegan (and some other) communities on Lemmy too. And it is one reason why I left beehaw. Because they allow toxic communities to flourish (as long as they were driven by a minority).
I’d even go as far as the behavior of some of these communities look like femaledatingadvice/thedonald on Reddit slowly. It’s ok to have disagreements, but nobody and no animals should be put at risk.
Yeah, it was definitely Animal abuse. Switching carnivorous animals to plant-diets to satisfy their humanitarian urges, is straight up abuse.
When I argued sanely over there I was basically just called a carnal apologist and banned. Shit was wild. Glad Lemmy picked up this stance; because what they were advocating was entirely wrong.
lol something like this is what made me stop participating at all on reddit. It was an atheism sub of all places and it was clear that some mod was sad that I had a different opinion. And I’m atheist too. It was straight up unnecessarily personal.
Every job has shitty managers, why wouldnt this one?
I suppose if those plant-based diets were based on peer-reviewed scientific studies and shown to cause no nutritional, physical, or mental harm to the animals then it wouldn’t be animal abuse. But I haven’t seen the threads so I’m assuming that wasn’t the case.
The problem with that, is you can find a scientific study that will give you almost any result you want. Scientific studies exist at all ends of the spectrum, contradicting each other constantly. It’s rather hard to actually get unbiased information today. Additionally, it’s pretty common knowledge that cats eat meat in the wild; no scientific reviews needed for that one.
Sounds like its not settled science and we should be able to discuss the spectrum of studies and current science around the topic without fear a man-child will take this as their moment to protect all of the cat world from the evil vegans.
Its absurd. Current science does not say that a cat cannot be healthy or healthier on a vegan diet, which is the only reason vegans are considering it in the first place.
If you all haven’t figured it out yet, animal wellbeing is the whole point, noone was advocating for hurting a cat.
About the other topic there will be a another post dont worry.
About the points i will bring it up to the team.
The other post isnt going to change the new rules from this post.
Have you apologized yet?
Lmao all this over meat eaters getting mad at vegan cat food? I’m genuinely impressed that redditors are managing to turn Lemmy into a caricature of the godawful website they left.
GG
there is most certainly some level of ethical behavior to follow in this line, theoretically if the being is getting all of the nutrition they need and isn’t struggling to survive in that sense, it really shouldn’t matter, but at the end of the day, i guess it starts to come back to the ethics behind pet ownership more than anything.
IDK to me it seems like feeding a carnivore a wholly vegan diet is probably ethically dubious at best. Most vegans would probably agree here, ironically. Feeding livestock a generic grain mix is probably not the most ethical decision.
I have no context to the thread that caused this struggle session but as a vegan and someone who knows for a fact people will take that shit out of context anyway I know that most vegans will either not have pets, or if they do don’t go as far as to malnourish it.
Most vegans interested in a “vegan cat food” are purely seeing a bunch of tinned/pouch food that claims to be nutritionally complete. I know that for some here the assumption is that vegans are trying to force feed Mr fluffles a carrot and kale soup.
As for whether that food is nutritionally complete depends on the animal, the brand, the testing, and the regulations. Turns out there’s a lot less rigor in ensuring foods are safe for animal consumption compared to humans!
The takeaway overall, imho, is that this is one of those times where having an “/R/all” frontpage makes for a great opportunity for a pile on, followed by mod overreach, and then a weird ass ToS change that’s more to spite a few people than to do any good.
I’m normally a Vegan hater but this is a whole new level. 👀
Yeah few vegans would steep as low as feeding a cat a vegan diet. So not really sad to see the particular individuals gone.
It’s perfectly possible to give animals vegan diets.
Sure. It’s also possible to feed your animal a bad diet. Notable, and in this particular case and for the particular animal, the two happen to go together, when you feed a cat a vegan diet, that’s a bad diet for a cat.
Will the cat immediately keel over? No.
Will some cats live long lives and be pretty healthy? Sure.
But on average, will your cat live shorter and worse if you feed it a purely vegan diet, respectively if you let it roam outside, will it be a seriously ferocious hunter as it tries to re-balance it’s diet? Yes, definitely.
Whether that’s consciable to you, that’s something you have to decide. I would however hope that especially someone who subsides on a vegan diet for their human diet would be against animal cruelty, and hence just feed their cat a mostly meat-based diet (not entirely, that’s not healthy either).
Yes, until the poor animal dies due to malnutrition. Just get a vegan pet
Stop it with the strawman.
Cats can be healthier on a plant-based diet.
-https://sustainablepetfood.info/
-https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
-https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
-https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
More animals die because non vegans decide that allowing one pet to live is fine but then go and pay in the supermarket to have some freshly slaughtered other animal.
Please don’t be a hypocrite.
Please don’t be a hypocrite.
It’s ridiculous that you don’t seem to realize how much this applies to your first post. 😂
Hahahah. This ignorance from the carnivores here truly knows no boundaries.
I’m not a carnivore? Been a vegetarian since for-fucking-ever, considering my age probably long since before most here knew about a word like “vegan” existing, on account of existance. Seriously, the fuck where did you take that from?
Don’t project, please.
lol, who’s the hypocrite here? People who openly admit to eating meat and not having a problem with animals getting killed for that purpose? Or maybe it’s a group of people who vehemently insist on animal rights but they end up abusing their own pets. What a twisted logic, mate.
You are incorrect. A vegan diet for animals is perfectly possible. You are thinking of vegans giving them salad, but vegans are actually carefully selecting and giving them the nutrients they need.
As I said, don’t be a hypocrite. You know jack shit.
Someone is misinformed.
I was under the impression that most criticism was directed not towards veganism per se but rather feeding a carnivore vegan diet which is animal abuse .
Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs, and What it Really Means to be Vegan by Jed Gillen
Great read!
You’re backing yourself into a corner where you’ll have to respond to every shitbird that comes crying some content hurt their feelings. Removing illegal material is the only thing that’s expected, moderating people’s opinions because they might make someone put glue on pizza is solved by a “nothing on this instance should be considered a fact” banner. It seems petty and the optics only get worse as you slowly burn out and stop being consistent in censoring shit. Because that’s what it is. A cat might not be too stoked with its carefully balanced plant-based slop, but it’d be alive. Hope you’ll go into kink communities and censor the shit out of risky sexual practices.
A cat might not be too stoked with its carefully balanced plant-based slop, but it’d be alive.
No, it wouldn’t, that’s the point.
Cats are obligate carnivores, they’ll die if they don’t eat food containing certain amino acids which aren’t present in plants.
That said, advocating animal abuse, even if it didn’t lead to the animal’s death (which in this case, again, it would), should be a bannable offense.
Hope you’ll go into kink communities and censor the shit out of risky sexual practices.
Those are consensual.
A cat being fed the feline equivalent of poison can’t consent.
So I understand this, vegans promoting vegan cat diets need scientifically proved reproducible peer reviewed studies backing their claims, while the “feed cats whatever garbage is in these cans as long as its meat™” crowd can just say it with their chest, right?
I didn’t consider admins any more qualified in parsing medical journals than mods are. I’ve got letters behind my name and am not supremely confident in that. That said, anything like a pro-ana community should be quickly purged.
I’ve got no idea about the context of the vegan drama though.
Okay, specifically ignoring fediaf language because they’re a vet nutritionist with strong understanding of amino acid profiles and bioavailability I take it (and I’m talking about the trigger happy admin here) https://europeanpetfood.org/pet-food-facts/fact-sheets/nutrition/vegetarian-diets/
Apparently that organization in your link has no issue advising its possible to have a healthy vegan/vegetarian diet. Guess they aren’t afraid people will kill their cats over it.
You keep posting this but it doesn’t back up your stance at all really
If you read what the vegans said, they pretty much echoed exactly what was on that site. “It’s hard, it’s likely not worth it, it requires cooperation with your vet, it’s possible.”
Reading the website, the message is pretty clearly “don’t fucking do this but if you do you have to go to a professional.”
And your cat will still feel like shit
Another fun note, the only sources for that article are over 20 years old with the exception of one in like 2013 titled:
‘Homemade dog food recipes can be a risky business, study finds’ (15 July 2013)
…yyyeeeeaaaahhhh
Uh huh. Here’s a literature review from a vegan.
“But what about this biased source!”
Nah…. I did skim it though, and the conclusion doesn’t actually provide anything solid other than “regular commercial food also bad”
Really my take away from all of this to is to stop buying cat food and start bringing home rodents and birds for them to chow down on.
Internet has brought so many new social issues and yet no philosophers to ponder and find good solutions even though no one is working.
Strange
im here, and i do enjoy a good ponder, unfortunately the political right and some of the political left have consumed 100% of my philosophical pondering over the last 5 or so years.
The fundamental problem here in regards to feeding a cat a vegan diet is that you are forcing something onto an existing sentient (to some degree) being.
You as a human could live on rice and water exclusively, but it would most certainly not be optimal. The same is generally true for most living beings. The ultimate question here, once we get past feeding a pet whatever diet, is that pet ownership is to some degree, probably unethical at the source. Feeding them inherently brings up an ethical dilemma, as they are not a human, they cannot make a conscious choice about how their food is acquired. You as a vegan could theoretically raise and kill game to feed a cat which is probably the most ethical solution here, but that’s not likely to be popular. The alternative being farm grown game, although it’s likely to be off cuts and byproduct as humans eat the most desired parts, so the end result is probably fairly insignificant, unless you’re feeding your cat a rich mans diet or something.
There is no one rule to fit all vegans, every vegan has to evaluate their own situations. You are right that some vegans are against all pet ownership. There is another group that believes if you rescue an animal from being euthanized or slaughtered and improve their standard of living and length of life, then that is ethical.
A huge part of being vegan is repetitive self-reflection, always searching for moral inconsistencies and working to fix them.
This is what leads vegans to consider a vegan diet for their pet, as if it was at least as healthy as non-vegan food, then less animals will be hurt due to the vegans choices.
Contrary to popular belief there are plenty of studies and case reports advocating for both sides of the argument of vegan cat food. Even by the admins new rules, we would be able to argue for vegan cat food as long as we only referenced studies.
Since its not settled either way, and multiple pet health and food organizations have stated their interest in researching the viability of vegan/vegetarian diets for dogs/cats, I think its fair to say it should be open for discussion.
Walk into a vet office and tell them you want your cat to eat a vegan diet and watch their eyes roll at the speed of sound out of their skull
Ive done just this. They were very supportive in the attempt, despite it ultimately not working out.
Also, not working out doesnt mean a dead cat. It meant she didnt like the taste of it so I switched back to food she would eat, with meat in it.
She actually did like the vegan kibble but she’s a majority wet food eater and didnt like the vegan wet food.
Lemmy.world is not real life, its a shit posting board.
And now the incident’s “debate” is here.
Lemmy vegans really wanna kill cats
Fearmongering with your lies.
Cats are actually healthier on formulated plant-based kibble synthesized with taurine, b12 and vitamin a.
To generalise is easy. To spot colour in a black and white world is a bit harder but in the end well worth it.
There’s a fine line between misinformation and “subjectively offensive information”. To me, this seems like it was a pretty clear case of abuse of power regardless of where you stand on the original issue and retroactively changing the rules to excuse that abuse does not bode well for this community.
You always have the option to move to another instance such as lemm.ee.
It takes a few clicks from the settings to export and import your subscriptions and block lists
You do know that everyone is aware they are not trapped here right?
Thank you all for doing this.
Thanks for banning discussion? Gonna have to explain that one.
You know what would be in the news, if a vegan forced their cat to be vegan until it died.
You know how many stories youll find about that. About 1 and the cat survived.
Now compare that to stories of healthy vegan cats, youll find plenty of those. Usually the stories are written from a skeptic point of view but the stories are there.
This doesn’t sound like free speech is welcomed here.
Am I wrong?
This instance gave me many signs of this happening, where only what one group of people think MUST be followed, but this kind of cements that now.
Define “free speech,” because contextually what you want sounds more like “speech without consequence” which is not the same thing, but rather a veil of plausible deniability in which to hide in, while being hateful.
How the hell do you know what I want?
Stop putting words into my mouth, and trying to gaslight me into being silent on mods here removing anything they want to at any time without repercussions.
Read: “contextually” and “sounds more like”
If you don’t like how you’re being called out then you should be introspective into why a generic statement made you so upset.
It’s not gaslighting when there’s a straight line of evidence.
To the wider world it looks like this: “Why do people think I don’t like dogs?! Just because I said I don’t like that you can’t kick dogs without getting a ticket nowadays! I didn’t kick any, I’m just saying!”
Who’s upset? The way I see it is you and others are the upset ones, because if you have to take the time out of your day to insinuate that others are horrible people just because they don’t see things the way you do, it means YOU’RE the ones with the issue.
(proof is in your above comment, again you try to gaslight saying there’s “evidence” when there’s nothing of the sort…lmao, it’s crazy how you all try the same tactics)
“how the hell do you know what I want?”
That’s an inherently aggressive statement.
It’s fine, but no reasonable person would think much differently.
Also, generalizing me with “you all” is a defensive catch-all to be dismissive of my point without actually making a stand for your own values.
It’s just a you-and-me conversation right now
If its just a you-and-them conversation why are you making appeals to popular opinion?
Do you believe having the popular opinion means its the right one?
The biggest issue with Reddit and Facebook was that they let stuff like this stick around it and eventually consume it.
It’s a good policy imho, and I’m happy to see it
Science should prevail
The science :
Considering these results overall, cats fed vegan diets tended to be healthier than cats fed meat-based diets. This trend was clear and consistent. These results largely concur with previous, similar studies. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284132
Sure might not be the best science but still science
Honestly (and I see you do recognise this in your comment) but this really seems like a kinda crappy study that I’m surprised made it into plos.
For instance I couldn’t find any evidence of them considering that the dietary choices of the guardian may affect the attitudes of the guardian to vetenarians (and thus the self-reported health of those animals). To take this further, in the scenario that a cat guardian believes their choices make their cat healthier, especially when going against vetinary orthodoxy, the guardian is probably less likely to take the cat to the vet for minor issues. This confounds the analysis of “healthiness” as performed by the authors.
Furthermore any cat that is not an indoor cat is likely also not fed a purely vegan diet (as they do hunt), so they should possibly account for that via a sort of bootstrapped approach. Generally the stats were okay though, and don’t make super strong claims from some pretty weak data. Though GAMs were a pretty odd choice and I’d have preferred some sort of explicit model fit with Bayesian fitting or NLLS.
In the end all of this points to the sort of thing where they should really have been doing perturbational research. I.e. feeding cats different diets in a controlled lab space. This is not the sort of research that lends itself to surveys and that seriously impacts the actual practicality of its findings.
Also as an aside, I really cannot abide anyone who includes a questionably inspirational quote that they said themselves in the fucking French Alps on their own website. That’s just pure wankery. The only people I usually see doing things like that are scientists like Trivers, which is not company one should wish to be in.
This is the limitation with policy made by people who just think “science” is when you quote an opinion with an article in a journal.
Decades of climate denialism, anti-veganism, and “race science” is perfectly acceptable under these rules because you could simply post studies funded by Exxon, meat and dairy lobbyists, and right-wing think-tanks which support their conclusion.
“Science should prevail” nerds could do well to consider that perhaps we have other means of identifying malicious behaviour. Any kind of checkbook exercise or algorithm that can pluck truth out of the air won’t work; the scientific method was never intended to declare X or Y as permanent facts the way we use it online.
quoting from your link: No reductions were statistically significant. Only one difference [re:disease] was statistically significant.
plus it was done by a pro-vegan group with obvious bias. so the results from the pro-vegan funded study are not terribly good at supporting veganism for cats as more healthy. it’s about the same, maybe less disease (severity of disease wasn’t covered in the abstract but would be a significant part of a decision). show me a study not funded by a pro-vegan group with similar or better results before I consider feeding my pet a diet very different from their natural diet.
All studies on this will either be funded for or against it. You can’t just claim bias cause you connected a pair of dots in your head.
The same logic would disqualify papers that support your opinion too, as they are funded by companies that make money from selling meat.
Because the priority for them is engagement, regardless of how harmful the content could be to people. Engagement doesn’t mean shit here because nobody’s profiting off of it.
If you think lemmy.world is worthless then you are mistaken.
Don’t these rules make communities about BBQ or cooking meat in general against the rules? BBQ does put “any living being in imminent danger”.
Don’t get me started on deep frying. And deep frying a turkey? That’s right out.
Deep frying a TURDUCKEN!
Can someone explain to me the context behind the incident that caused this? I am entirely out of the loop.
This thread. Apparently the dietary requirements of cats is a contentious topic.
edit: Sorry also this thread that I hadn’t seen before.
If you are a vegan and want animal companionship, get a vegan pet!! Rabbits, birds, and guinea pigs are great options. Cats and dogs are not options for meatless pets, regardless of how avaliable they are.
Thank you medical professional who surely also has experience with nutrition.
It’s only contentious for vegans. No one else thinks cats can be vegan
Noone else has considered it, and they are going with their gut reaction rather than consider both sides. Isnt the internet a fun place!
