I am a conservative. Scratch that, fuck labels. I’m a dude who thinks all guns should be legal, I don’t care if you’re lgbt or if you smoke weed, I think illegal immigrants should be deported, and abortion is murder. When I first heard about lemmy, I thought it was a good idea. Reddit was and still is a bad place, for probably all the same reasons you guys think it’s a bad place. It’s decentralized! That way if you get bad admins or even just a bad mod team, you can just fuck off to the next instance. So like many, I made an account on the largest instance, lemmy.world. And being me, I found the conservative community there to be dead. So I figured I would revive it a bit, and started posting. Unfortunately, another user took issue with that, and every time I would post something, he’d post soon after, and bury my post. This happened time and time again. I would report it and nothing would be done. The sub had basically been abandoned. So I decided that I might as well do it myself. And I created conservative on lemm.ee [http://lemm.ee], a place where conservatives could post, and everyone could comment about it. I had a plan of action, I’d post once or twice a day. I didn’t want to overwhelm anything, just keep it steady, invite conversation, and try to help add to lemmy. Well it didn’t go well. We had more than our share of trolls, and I didn’t want to be a power mod. So I failed to do my job. I rarely banned people and when I did, I gave out short bans, and then they’d just either come back, or create an alt and do it again. Notably, there was one user that for some dumb reason, I decided that if I perma banned him, I was a power tripping mod. So I didn’t, and I regret it. One memorable incident was when I happened to know about the most popular hentai site in North America, and so a user made it his life goal to follow me around and harass me for the sin of knowing about the most popular hentai site in North America, constantly calling me a pedophile. Of course I reported him, but he kept making alt accounts to get around bans and blocks. My biggest mistake was the namecalling ban, which got me banned from most of lemmy. I still stand by the intent, if not the specific rule. It should’ve been more generic, a rule against namecalling, and not a simple term ban. I had two mods, both of them great. I really appreciated you guys, even I never said it directly. Over time, I slowly lost any wish to continue. Then I had a major life event, negative, and I left a couple weeks later. Now lemm.ee [http://lemm.ee] is shutting down, and I found about it via reddit. I’m not sure what happened, why I’m not a mod nor is wintermute, and why my community appears to be yet another left wing community, but it doesn’t matter. And now here I am, posting about my experience here.