Another day old and deeper in debt.

Smurfing was pretty bananas in Rocket League too.
Mixed that with people convinced they should be ranked much higher and the only thing holding them back was their teammates and yes that could be pretty toxic too.
I once unknowingly let my nephew play ranked on my account and I had to rank back up from gold, which is the closest I've come to smurfing.
It was only a few games until the mmr leveled out, but the gold games were honestly harder than plat or diamond because of how many people don't even have the self-awareness to know they're messing up.
I mean, I'm messing up all the time too, I just don't need to blame my teammates.

That said, I haven't played much since Epic got their hands on it.

Ehhh... I'll try to assume the best here and just quote what Wikipedia has to say on struggle sessions.
If you read that and still think that's an apt choice of words, then... idk? yikes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

Struggle sessions or denunciation rallies were violent public spectacles in Maoist China where people accused of being "class enemies" were publicly humiliated, accused, beaten and tortured by people with whom they were close. Usually conducted at the workplace, classrooms and auditoriums, "students were pitted against their teachers, friends and spouses were pressured to betray one another, [and] children were manipulated into exposing their parents". Staging, scripts and agitators were prearranged by the Maoists to incite crowd support. The aim was to instill a crusading spirit among the crowd to promote the Maoist thought reform. These rallies were most popular in the mass campaigns immediately before and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution.

Regardless of where one stands on this particular topic, I don't think this is a term we should ever want associated with anything, let alone our vote discussion threads?

The discussion should be an integral part of the vote and decision making process and to me, dismissing it or shitting on in kinda stinks up the whole thing.
Dismissal, and implying the discussion is a sham, coming from someone in a position of power... I mean yea, that's kind of insulting? — not to me, but to the ideals of this place and the agora.

I can't really know your intent, and while I prefer to assume the best, it's not really a good look.

Not much of value was lost.

Aye

Calling this present thread a "struggle session" is dismissive at best if not downright insulting and I expect better from our mod team.

That's a highly suspicious use of a ban that I would like admin feedback on.

While your take about decision making is slightly wrong...
We're federating with everything by default and use blocklists. Hexbear is fedetating with nobody by default and uses allowlists.
Basically, no action has been made by local admins for this new federation to happen.
We never had to defederate them before because they weren't fedetating with us.

The next step would be discussion then vote in the agora. I expect defederation to take a bit more than a week if the process hasn't changed too much since last time.

That said, your comment isn't anywhere near ban worthy and is a really bad optics on whichever mod was involved in that.

It is currently not a feature in lemmy, unless you want to manually block thousands of users one at a time

I can disagree with tankies and the extreme right.
Also, the US democratic party is about as left as my right arm, it's just that the US Overton window flew off long ago