A moderator claimed that a removal done on their instance was an admin, not a moderator, despite what the log says.

Suffice it to say my trust level of that community's moderators is relatively low - even for random strangers on the internet - but I fully acknowledge they could be telling the truth so I was hoping to get a public, third party, second opinion as far as whether or not that's the case.

Semi-related, but I have also encountered moderators claiming they have no idea which moderator on the team took an action, which if true is also a bit annoying as bad moderators can claim it wasn't them when it really was.

On the bright side, it's another Fediverse Win compared to Reddit, who I'm sure you all know doesn't have any mod logs whatsoever. The admin and moderator transparency culture there is also extremely limited, but at least here there are logs at all, even if they sometimes get the Flock treatment of: "reason: whatever"

P.S. I'm not implying individual moderators or admins should be identified by username in the logs, as that would almost certainly lead to harassment.

No point in censoring that picture. Everyone's modlog, including yours, is public.

Regarding the topic, I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think I've ever seen that tab say anything other than "mod", even when a user was instance-banned, presumably by an admin. So they might be telling the truth. Considering who moderates the community, I wouldn't really trust them either though.

I'm aware. I wanted to prevent lazy brigaders. Not everyone knows what you just said.

Regarding the topic, I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen that tab say anything other than “mod”, even when a user was instance-banned, presumably by an admin. So they might be telling the truth. Considering who moderates the community, I wouldn’t really trust them either though.

Fair points. You just inspired me to dig around in some known trolls who I think I saw instance bans in their mod logs and see if that also says "mod," because if so, that's pretty much proof positive the mod in question is right (because community mods can't instance ban, right?)

Edit:

Found a possible one. Do you think this is an instance ban?:

Unlike the other bans I saw in their log, it doesn't say the community (or the instance), which might imply it's an instance ban.

It also cites an instance rule, though I've seen removals and bans from communities citing instance rules so that's far weaker evidence.

If you see somebody get banned from a dozen unrelated comms on the same instance at one go, it's an instance ban. Can confirm it will show up as a mod ban on lemmy UI.

Yup, and it happens often enough that it shows up at PTB because it isn't always evident that's what happened.

They absolutely know what mod performed an action. The interface you open the instance with determines whether or not you see mod action. I think tesseract used to show this, haven’t used it in a LONG time since I left .world because ironically, I think the moderation and administration sit around castrating one another in attempts to see who can have the least amount of balls.

PTB is still around?

Yup. On the db0 instance. Kinda crazy, kinda entertaining

I blocked them when they became a .ml clone. Forgot they existed…

I can't speak for their instance (or the Fediverse code more broadly), but after this comment I double-checked and can confirm that on ours it does show which mod (or admin) did what to the mod team.

... yet another layer of confusion. Are you absolutely sure it can present as you say?

Going by memory to something I didn't really pay much attention to, but about 90% sure.

Do you know where I can look this kind of thing up, other than spamming Lemmy Support posts comprised of my piecemeal questions?

You could try one of the more generic lemmy / fediverse meta comms, or there's a public matrix channel where the admins and technical guys hang out. Think it's linked in one of aforementioned comms.

Okay I'll poke around, thanks.