Where can I report moderator abuse on Fedora’s Matrix channels? I just want to document this in the right place.
I was threatened by @khaytsus:libera.chat (apparently an account belonging to a moderator of #fedora:fedoraproject.org) while helping another user. This mod was being very aggressive with their “help” and didn’t like that the other user responded better to me.
Screenshot of the threat to “quiet” me (which as far as I understand in IRC terms means muting someone so they can’t send to a channel, not merely muting them personally so you don’t see their messages):
If they wanted to make me feel unwelcome then they succeeded. The other user left immediately; I have also left all Fedora channels, and will switch homeservers as I don’t want to be associated with or promote fedora.im in any way.
I’m marking this as unlisted (visible if you have the URL and to moderators) , at least temporarily — we’ll handle this through the code of conduct process. If you’d like this to remain public, though, let me know.
Please don’t unlist this. I haven’t had time to follow the COC process but I will this week.
It seems to me that private (or public but obscure) reporting is partly why this type of behaviour continues for 17+[1] years with the same known abusive moderators. Private(ish) reporting benefits the in-group and is a disadvantage for everyone else (Fedora users at large). The in-group can hold meetings that only they attend and decide they did nothing wrong, or change some words on a page somewhere and call it progress.
If I had known that the moderators of Fedora’s Matrix channels are from Fedora IRC, I could have looked at the IRC SIG and seen all the tickets, seen the above mailing list thread, and made an informed decision not to sign up for a fedora.im account or use any of Fedora’s channels in the first place.
Additional points:
Moderators should not use a non-moderator account yet speak with the authority of a moderator. This is confusing at best. How can a regular user know that it isn’t a case of impersonation? Note the moderator in question has 3 accounts logged in at once; 2 are marked as moderators on the Matrix side but they were threatening me with the 3rd non-moderator one.
Matrix moderators should use Matrix terminology, not IRC terminology. Matrix is the “primary” chat channel of Fedora.
I’m still not sure of the relationship between the channel moderators and Matrix SIG, if there was any process for selecting moderators. This may be of interest to other users who choose to use Fedora Matrix (not me).
The way Matrix works prevents users from seeing how Fedora’s channels are run before signing up.
We did take some action at the time of the previous report, and it’s been my general understanding that things have been better since — but “better” isn’t necessarily good enough, and on the face of it this particular interaction is absolutely not what I want to see for Fedora. Thank you for taking the time to report.
