Walk into a vet office and tell them you want your cat to eat a vegan diet and watch their eyes roll at the speed of sound out of their skull

While I disagree with the stance the vegans took in this. The ~~mods~~ admins reaction to the situation was way out of proportion, and it definitely seems like you're updating the ToS to justify what he did retroactively instead of addressing his behavior, which was way out of line.

Oh man this ones got some flavour to sink ones teeth into 😅

I take the side of the admin. If someone can't accept or understand that a cat eats a meat based diet then they deserve to have reality thrown in their face. Better than some poor animals being tortured.

It's great that the admins are putting so much effort into getting this right.

Sadly, I don't think this is the way. Adding this to the ToS means you admins will always be in the centre of every unwinnable situation that arises.

You need a committee to deal with these issues on a case by case basis. There are many advantages to this:

• You can be tough but flexible and adaptive
• you can enlist the help of people with more time
• you can enlist the help of people with experience writing policies
• committee members can resign or be discontinued when they become embroiled in some shit storm.
• you can retain veto power

I don't want to be critical of the ToS because someone has put a lot of thought into it, but the most charitable thing I can say is that its unlikely to serve its intended purpose.

Respectfully, I believe this incident serves more as a learning opportunity for the admin team rather than a reason to amend the rules.

This isn’t the first time I’ve observed Rooki acting inappropriately for an admin of a community. As an admin of a (admittedly much smaller) corner of the internet, I’ve learned to interact with users in a way that is polite and ensures they feel safe and heard. This is at least the second instance where I’ve seen Rooki respond emotionally and rather adversarially towards users, which has, in my view, undermined their credibility, to the point that I hope to avoid future interactions with them.

I understand that managing LW, one of the largest and general-purpose instances, especially with Lemmy’s still rather limited moderation tools, is challenging, and I appreciate the hard work all of you, including Rooki, put into maintaining it and making it run as smoothly as it does. I'm NOT asking for their removal; however, considering that this is not the first time I’ve seen Rooki behave uncivilly and antagonistically towards users, I hope that this will be a formative experience for them.

(Edit for clarity)

Cats need a meat

The biggest issue with Reddit and Facebook was that they let stuff like this stick around it and eventually consume it.

It's a good policy imho, and I'm happy to see it

Science should prevail

As a former site admin, I will say right now that leaving any kind of rule "open to interpretation" is the WORST thing you could do. The only interpretation of the rules of your site should be the your (the site admin's) interpretation. That's it. Rules should be easy to understand and easily convey the correct interpretation.

Leaving the rules open to interpretation only leads to disagreements and arguments. It is better for users to have concrete rules with a reliably consistent correct interpretation than for everyone to complain because their interpretation of a rule lets them do whatever they want. Just my two cents on that.

I’m glad to see site-wide action taken against the spread of harmful disinformation.

There's a fine line between misinformation and "subjectively offensive information". To me, this seems like it was a pretty clear case of abuse of power regardless of where you stand on the original issue and retroactively changing the rules to excuse that abuse does not bode well for this community.