Hi!

I'm a new mod. I have two fresh coms on two instances, things have been pretty smooth.

I thought about banning when I noticed about half of my posts were being downvoted by the same user with no upvotes or engagement. I'm waiting to see if it continues, so I'm not banning them yet.

Next, I was clicking around in the Connect app trying to figure it out when it froze and I somehow banned myself from my own community. The admin here at Lemmy.Today helped me out pretty quick.

So my questions are:

Is it possible to ban someone without a post or comment, and how?

Do you think chronic downvoting is a good reason to ban someone?

How do you unban a user? Follow up, is this a good reason to make an alternate mod account just in case?

What are some of your reasons for banning people, and why?

I found a lot of great information on moderating in general, but almost nothing on how to do things. Are there any resources I might have missed?

PARIS — Two more suspects were charged on Saturday in the Louvre jewel heist case, three days after their arrests. A total of four people are now being held and charged with stealing $100 million worth of royal jewels from the Paris museum two weeks ago.

The jewels are still missing.

The prosecutor said in a statement on Saturday that two of the five people who were arrested on Wednesday have been charged. One, a 37-year-old alleged to be part of the four-man team that police believe carried out the heist, has been charged with organized theft and criminal conspiracy. Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said he was already known to judicial authorities. The other, a 38-year-old woman, has been charged with complicity in preparing the crime.

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Independent Media

I made an "almost anything goes" community for all things journalism a short while ago. So, this is a more serious community that only posts news, reports and editorials from independent journalists and publications. A lot of news media is owned by the same big corps, so this is an effort to expose more diverse perspectives.

Being in North America means most of my media has a western bias, but I make an effort to seek out independent, quality publications from around the world to diversify the feed. Anyone can post to this community with articles from anywhere, as long as it fits the spirit of independent journalism.

The International Space Station is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern age. It is the largest, most complex, most expensive and most durable spacecraft ever built.

Its first modules were launched in 1998. The first crew to live on the International Space Station – an American and two Russians – entered it in 2000. Nov. 2, 2025, marks 25 years of continuous habitation by at least two people, and as many as 13 at one time. It is a singular example of international cooperation that has stood the test of time.

Two hundred and ninety people from 26 countries have now visited the space station, several of them staying for a year or more. More than 40% of all the humans who have ever been to space have been International Space Station visitors.

The station has been the locus of thousands of scientific and engineering studies using almost 200 distinct scientific facilities, investigating everything from astronomical phenomena and basic physics to crew health and plant growth. The phenomenon of space tourism was born on the space station. Altogether, astronauts have accumulated almost 127 person-years of experience on the station, and a deep understanding of what it takes to live in low Earth orbit.

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The first thing most people recall about Nathan Gill is his imposing height.

At 193cm (6ft 4in), the one-time Reform UK leader in Wales towered over colleagues and opponents – and he was taller still in his favourite cowboy boots.

Other than that, the softly-spoken 52-year-old was a largely unremarkable presence among the more colourful characters in Nigel Farage’s parties.

Until recently, political profiles have dwelt on Gill’s politically quirky status: the teetotal member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who bore Ukip’s flag in the Senedd, even if opponents charged that he was often absent.

Yet his legacy is now a very different and disturbing one. This month he will be sentenced at the Old Bailey after pleading guilty to taking bribes to make statements in favour of Russia during his tenure as a member of the European parliament.

The Trump administration’s upcoming proposed regulation would make two hugely consequential changes to the Social Security Administration’s disability system, according to four SSA officials with knowledge of the plans. First, it would modernize the job listings that Social Security’s disability adjudicators and judges use to decide if there’s work available in the U.S. economy that a manual laborer could do despite physical impairments — like a low-skilled desk job at a computer or driving for Uber or DoorDash. Second, the new rule would almost entirely remove age as a criterion, in most instances making a 50-plus-year-old like Tincher no more eligible for assistance than a 20-something.

Dictionary.com has crowned a set of numbers as its 2025 word of the year.

It says it reserves that distinction for a word that reflects "social trends and global events that defined that year" and "reveals the stories we tell about ourselves and how we've changed over the year." The word of the year is both viral vernacular and a linguistic time capsule (last year's, for example, was "demure").

This year, that honor goes to "67" — pronounced "six seven" — a slang term that's been delighting kids, exasperating teachers and befuddling adults for months.

It has its roots in the song "Doot Doot (6 7)", which Philadelphia-based rapper Skrilla released last December.

For centuries the supernatural, and Halloween in particular, have been contested territory. Folklorists have interpreted Halloween as a relic of pre-Christian Celtic beliefs, when the turn of the seasons was thought to weaken the membrane separating the living and the dead. Some Christian evangelicals, especially in the US, view it as a sinister and sinful celebration of the occult. There’s also the perennial complaint that it’s nothing more than a recent, brash American import.

None of these claims is quite true. There may once have been an ancient festival at this time of year, but the evidence is from centuries later and doesn’t support the assertions that any celebrations had a supernatural dimension. Evangelicals’ fear reveals more about their own brand of Christianity than about why Halloween has its ghoulish associations.

Like haunted houses? Scientists do.

That's because they're an excellent place to study how humans respond to — and actively seek out — fear.

"Typically when we study things in the lab, we're exposing people to these repeated, low-intensity experiences. And that's not really the way we experience threat in the real world," says neuroscientist Sarah Tashjian, head of the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab at the University of Melbourne. "Haunted houses have a benefit in that they're these really immersive experiences that have all of these sensations going on at the same time … so they're closer to what we might experience in the real world."

As Pax Americana ends, a multipolar order is emerging. The history of Southeast Asia holds lessons for what’s to come.

The liberal international order or Pax Americana, the world order built by the United States after the Second World War, is coming to an end. Not surprisingly, this has led to fears of disorder and chaos and, even worse, impending Chinese hegemony or Pax Sinica. Importantly, this mode of thinking that envisages the necessity of a dominant or hegemonic power underwriting global stability was developed by 20th-century US scholars of international relations, and is known as the hegemonic stability theory (HST).

Approximately 460 patients and their companions were killed in a horrific massacre at a hospital in el-Fasher, Sudan, on Tuesday, the UN reports, amid a takeover of the North Darfur capital by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) this week.

The casualties are among the 2,000 people estimated by Sudanese officials to have been killed since the paramilitary group’s takeover of the city on Sunday.

The Blackfeet Nation in Montana is preparing to feed the people during the government shutdown by distributing buffalo meat and organizing an elk hunt. In Rapid City, South Dakota, Lakota are organizing mutual aid. In North Dakota, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation is keeping all its food programs going, with hot meals and bagged lunches, and making sure children, elderly and college students don't go hungry. On the west coast, an Indigenous restaurant owned by Crystal Wahpepah, Kickapoo, is serving up free bison tacos for young ones and elders in Oakland, California.

Slung across Chenab river canyon, the Chenab bridge is by all accounts considered a modern engineering marvel. Two decades in the making, it is at once a post-card moment, a monument to ingenuity, and a symbol of progress—everything one would expect from the biggest, strongest, best, and most challenging project for Indian Railways since 1947.