cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25042034
This post is "FYI only" for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the "adult human female" dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and "civil disagreement" on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to "sort it out through discussion and voting". However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little "sorting out" has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
I think it seems justified. Ava's moderation approach may seem heavy handed, but she hasn't done anything unjustified.
Yeah, this is just the Fediverse operating as intended. Some instances are heavily federated, others are less so. This gives people options.
Moreover, it's her instance, and she can do whatever she wants with it.
Its users are free to leave whenever they wish, but I doubt many will as a result of this bc (a) Ada is awesome, and (b) the comments look strongly in her favor. Also (c) Ava's policies are clearly explained at the outset, and firmly and fairly applied.
Our approval outside of the situation does not matter in the slightest:-).
(~~That said, if it did, I would want to see some additional context, bc wine that phrase can be used as a dog whistle, I believe it may also be legitimate as well. I would strongly hope that the additional context in this case provided the justification that I can't fully see here. Which knowing Ada, seems highly likely.~~ Edit: if this comment really is it, then nvm, I get it. Tbf that really does seem like a discussion that needs to be had among centrists, but I can totally see why Blåhaj doesn't want to federate that content and thereby host it on its own servers. So without prejudicial judgement either for or against the original comment, I definitely support Ada's call here. As I always end up doing when I dig deeply enough to see what's going on in each situation. I am not saying that I would have done it - perhaps a community block or other reduced feature could have been applied, but for her server, it's her right.)
Most of the people who aren't in favor of it are not even on blahaj.
They know who she (Ada) is - and that's why they are on blahaj in the first place!:-)
Eh, there was a situation a while ago with the LemmyNSFW instance that I felt was a bit much. However, the sidebar of the community they had issue with didn't help LemmyNSFW's case despite the fact it was a copy-pasted dictionary definition.
Do you have more details?
This was a long time back, but Blahaj Zone defederated with the LemmyNSFW community a while ago since LemmyNSFW had a community by the name of "Adorable Porn", reason being that they thought it was content that appealed to pedophiles and the likes.
The community had some irl pornographic content with cutesy sorta vibes, mainly of petite women. The admins of Blahaj Zone basically demanded LemmyNSFW remove the community, or they would defederate since they thought it was reverse jailbait, adults made to look like minors.
The community description didn't really help at all seeing that it had the term "child-like" there, which is likely what set the spark for the entire interaction, but it was copy-pasted from a dictionary definition. Also pouring fuel on the fire iirc was the fact that the admins of LemmyNSFW have English as their second language, so that might have also gotten in the way of things.
It's been a while since this all happened, but from what I remember they removed "child-like" from the community description, but Blahaj Zone ended up defederating anyway still of the opinion that the community's purpose was to appeal to pedos.
I just remember seeing this all go down cause for a time since I was windowshopping for a new instance to move to, and was using Blahaj Zone's website to check what was posted to 196, and saw it the defederation notice stickied to the homepage.
You wanna bet?