I will say that it isn't usually like this.

I mean there's always drama somewhere but this drama is especially big because a LOT of people found out all at once that either:

1. their content feeds were being censored/manipulated without their knowledge

Or

2. They were being shadowbanned (either as an individual or because their home server was censored)

by a developer who went to some pretty incriminating lengths to obfuscate the censorship he was baking into a tool that lots of people were using.

Most of the time I look at my memes and the drama passes me right by. It's there if you look for it, of course, but this particular snafu is a bit of an outlier.

It's not normally like this. Also, this dude actually holds very little power here.

I got vitamin D gummies now. I'll never have to go outside ever again.

This has never happened before, FYI. You literally came in at a weird time lol, probably even the peak of this random event. It's about some dev who made a web frontend for some Lemmy instances' desktop web browsers and went on a power trip to mass-shadowban people as he saw fit (he claimed to be anti-conservative even though the overwhelming Lemmy user base already is, FWIW). Now he's left, it seems, so I think things should calm down.

Usually, the drama around here is the .ml and .hexbear admins being high on some tyrannical echo chamber logic and banning people for suggesting even slightly that China's not perfect. And that's pretty distant from .world and sh.itjustworks, and everywhere else. About as notable as your neighbor a couple blocks over getting into beef with the neighbors' kids. Background noise at best, and barely relevant.

This is new, unusual, and definitely a one-time deal. Dude was a conservative who secretly made a tremendous blocklist of most of the people here who'd ever said anything critical of conservatism, and plugged it into the front-end app he managed without telling anyone. Literally was secretly censoring a massive chunk of the userbase. His secret blocklist got published, and those of us who managed to get on it have been patting each other on the back because we made a Nazi mad.

And now he's throwing a big old tantrum because he got caught.

Hey, at least it's entertaining.