Update on Jordan Lund | Update 2025-10-06 01:27 UTC - Lemmy.World
Hello World, as some of you might be aware, there have been various accusations
against one of our former community team members, Jordan Lund
[https://lemmy.world/u/jordanlund]. We have removed Jordan as a member of our
community team a week ago, on 23rd of September, due to various behavior that we
do not consider acceptable for a member of our team. We haven’t posted about
this earlier, as we’re still in the progress of reviewing and making decisions,
and we originally expected to be able to conclude this earlier, within a time
frame where we could have presented the final outcome in the first post. During
his time with Lemmy.World, Jordan has been helping out our team with various
admin-level tasks, as well as moderating a few large communities, including
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.world/c/news],
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.world/c/world] and
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/politics]. As far as we can tell, most of his actions,
including moderation actions, were in alignment with both our instance rules and
also rules and spirit of the affected communities. Unfortunately, this does not
apply to all his actions. We have identified multiple cases of conduct that do
not align with what we expect from members of our team. We currently do not have
any explicit rules or code of conduct for our community team or other team
members like instance admins on top of our ToS/bylaws, as we expected to have a
common understanding of acceptable behavior. In the past we already had
discussions with Jordan about some of this behavior and we believed that to be
enough at that time. Going forward, we will be working on a code of conduct
applicable to all members of our team, including community team and anyone
above. Being a member of our community team provides additional privileges for
selected members, such as the ability to appoint community moderators, update
our community spotlight or even banning users. In Jordan’s case this included
permissions to appoint community moderators and ban users from the instance. As
of today, we are not aware of misuse of these additional privileges. Once we
have reviewed other actions taken by Jordan we will also review these types of
actions taken by Jordan in the recent past. If you believe that you or someone
else was incorrectly banned from Lemmy.World, you’re welcome to appeal your ban
by reaching out to our team. As we currently have some technical issues with our
ticket system, I recommend sending an email to report at lemmy dot world for the
time being, visting our Matrix room #general:lemmy.world
[https://matrix.to/#%2F%23general%3Alemmy.world%3Fvia=lemmy.world&via=matrix.org&via=t2bot.io]
or reaching out to @[email protected] [/u/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/u/MrKaplan] directly, also possible via Matrix at
@mrkaplan:lemmy.world. Following our instance rules
[https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#22-community-mod-removal], we have a few
cases in which we may remove community moderators from their communities: 1.
Grossly committing a violation of the Terms of Service 2. Acting repeatedly
against the local community rules 3. Extended periods of inactivity, as evident
by lack of public interaction and/or failure to respond to reports We are still
discussing whether we consider his behavior a “gross violation of our ToS”, as
there are definitely some arguments to be made in favor of that. This includes
for example using incorrect gendered pronouns, which we will update in our ToS
in the coming days to make it more clear to everyone that this will not be
tolerated. Due to his previous and current position we are still discussing what
our final resolution to this issue will be as far as instance rules are
concerned. Whether or not a person is trolling does not justify using incorrect
pronouns for them. We have also informed Jordan that we expect his behavior in
this regard to change immediately. We’re currently also in conversations with
other moderators of communities moderated by Jordan to review their position on
his behavior within their communities and whether they believe that his actions
in those communities were appropriate and in line with the community rules. As a
reminder, the order of community moderators in the sidebar has direct impact on
the moderator hierarchy, where a moderator listed earlier is able to remove any
moderators later in the list. This means even if an action might not (yet) be
taken by instance admins, other community moderators may be able to remove
moderators if they’re no longer desired to be part of the team. Especially
community rules about civility and respectful conduct do not appear to have been
followed in a number of cases, and we are reviewing with the community
moderators whether this is in line with other content they would usually
moderate/not moderate. It should also be noted that not all things reported to
us are actually or clearly violating our rules, even if we may not agree with
them. For example, we currently do not have rules about moderators removing
other people’s arguments, especially as “misinformation”, to strengthen their
own misguided arguments, and then continue to accuse the other side of
misinformation later on. We do expect our team members to not use positions of
power to “win arguments” or falsely accuse others of misinformation, when this
isn’t actually the case. Therefore, while this example is not something we
tolerate for members of our team, having this happen on community level (by a
person who isn’t also holding a role above community mod at that time) is
currently not something we are enforcing. Once we have worked out a CoC for
members of our team, we will post about this separately and also gather
community feedback on whether you believe that enforcement of that (or parts of
it, or more things) should also include moderators of Lemmy.World communities.
Additionally, we will also be looking at expanding our community team a bit in
the near future, as we have both lost some people over time and recently also
Jordan. We will also be posting about this separately, currently expected to be
in a few weeks, with a description of expectations and responsibilities. We will
also be updating this post over the coming days until we have finished our
review and actions. — Update 2025-10-06 01:27 UTC: After reviewing various
comments and actions by Jordan, he has received a warning, especially relating
to following our rules at
https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#1-attacks-on-people-or-groups
[https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#1-attacks-on-people-or-groups]. Going forward,
if we see additional violations of our rules, especially when it comes to
attacking others, we will consider additional consequences in the form of a
temporary or permanent ban. If you still see Jordan’s behaving in ways violating
our ToS, please report this directly to us, e.g. through a pm to
@[email protected] [/u/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport]. We always review messages received by this
account in our team. In line with our current rules about potentially removing
community moderators, we have reviewed the communities Jordan is currently a
moderator in: 1. [email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/politics]: This community has active moderators above
Jordan Lund, such as @[email protected] [/u/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/u/aidan]. 2. [email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/news] This community has active moderators above Jordan
Lund, such as @[email protected] [/u/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/u/JonsJava]. 3. [email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/world]: We have moved Jordan from being top moderator to
being bottom moderator. New top moderator is @[email protected]
[/u/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.world/u/Tenthrow]. 4.
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/business]: No other active mods 5.
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/comicbooks]: No other active mods 6.
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/portland_oregon]: No other active mods 7.
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/thepoliceproblem]: We have moved Jordan from being top
moderator to being bottom moderator. New (active) top moderator is
@[email protected] [/u/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/u/JonsJava]. 8. [email protected]
[/c/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.world/c/hottubs]: No other active mods
9. [email protected] [/c/[email protected]]
[https://lemmy.world/c/keeptrack]: No other active mods Any community moderator
above Jordan will be able to remove him from his moderator position, should they
decide that he is not a good fit for the community. It is up to those community
moderators whether they want to keep him on the team. We generally intend to
limit our involvement in community moderation to enforcement of instance rules.
Without disallowing other community mods to add Jordan back as a moderator,
there would also not be much impact of removing him entirely, as they could just
add him back right away. If you do not agree with the rules in a community or
the way it is moderated, it’s always possible to look for alternative
communities with different rules, different mods, or creating your own
community. Having said this, we’re still working on our team CoC, and will be
gathering community feedback in a standalone post to determine whether we should
enforce additional standards for community moderators. Our review of Jordan’s
delegated admin actions (instance bans) are still pending. Unless we find
evidence of this having been abused, we we do not currently expect additional
consequences to arise from this.