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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards @lemmy.dbzer0.com
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lemmy.blahaj.zone defederates feddit.uk

There's a post about it.

That post explicitly says it's not a place for debate or participation from users of other instances.

I'd like to respect that but I think events like this need debate and discussion because it helps to develop and evolve the culture of lemmy and the fediverse in general.

The post says:

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.

126 comments

  • Good decision by Ada. I'm also quite pleased with how many instance mates stood up in here to defend blahaj's decision.

    PS: It occurs to me we might need a name for our peeps. I.e. like one talks about "lemmings" or "redditors", we could use something for members of the divisions by zero. Edit

  • PTB

    Blahj is a problem instance.

    The important distinction here is that they're not simply trying to moderate their communities. They're free to moderate their communities for their users. They want to push their rules on other instances.

    They're not free to dictate to the greater social media space the acceptable policies on discourse. Their admins are constantly trying to enforce their ban lists on other servers and communities (or else, you see what happened to feddit.uk).

    To see this, go make a new account and get banned from Blahj (you don't even have to post in their communities, see my PTB post as an example) and you'll see that 40+ other completely unrelated communities will also automatically ban you. This is the result of their backroom bullying and toxic behavior towards other admins/mods.

    It's easier for an admin or moderator to simply accept their bans than to deal with admins who will take extreme measures, like defederate your entire instance (and lobby others to defederate you) if you don't accept their dictates.

    If their goal is to create an instance with communities for trans people then banning users from their communities would serve their goals.

    But, that isn't what they're trying to do. This isn't about creating a safe space, they have all of the tools that they need to make Blahj safe. Blahj users in Blahj communities could have been protected from this problem user by the user being banned.

    There's no need to contact the admins of other instances to ban a user from your instance or from your communities. Trying to bully other instances or communities isn't required and it is incredibly toxic. Even the moderator here, in this community, has received pressure from Blahj admins about suppressing topics related to Blahj.

    • To be honest we were just getting sick of all the posts complaining about Blajah's policy of banning folks who they consider to be transphobic from their instance. No pressure was applied from Blajah, we just felt it was the right thing to do. Your whole narrative is bullshit tbh.

      In reality, the fediverse is (mostly) quite left wing compared to most other social media spaces, so obviously the majority of instances are gonna be supportive of Blajah's attempt to create a safe space for those folks who need or want that. While we don't run dbzer0 as a safe space, I think it's great that those spaces exist. And they only exist at all because Ada and her team go to a lot of effort to keep it that way.

      And by way of comparison, we recently had a vote in our governance community about defederating from another instance because their admin initially didn't want to take action against some right wing communities, and we felt it was becoming a nazi bar situation. The whole point of having the vote was to apply pressure on the admin to deal with it. And there was a positive outcome because the admin did deal with it and so we didn't defederate. I mean sure, the admin didn't like being pressured, but it got the job done.

      Hopefully feddit.uk will change their policy to explicitly ban anti-trans dogwhistles, and the fediverse will be better for it imo. Freeze peach instances all become nazi-bars before long.

    • It is content censorship... No feddit.UK rules were broken is my understanding

      They proceeded to have a melt down over another admin not doing as they got told...

      Enough with this shite, these people are not mature enough to be federated to gen pop

      • It is content censorship

        Yes, exactly, it's censoring transphobic content. That's the whole point.

      • It is content censorship

        Exactly.

        People treating this like it is justified seem to misunderstand how the federated social media space works.

        If the Blahj admins felt that the user wasn't welcome in their communities then they could ban them. That's the end of that user.

        There is zero reason to contact the admins of another instance.

        The reason they're doing this is because they want to pressure the admins to change their content moderation policy to something that the Blahj admins (I mean Ada) approve of. If the admins feel that it is too onerous to do so, well then they can just apply the Blahj supplied user ban list to automate the process.

        So now if Blahj bans you, you'll get banned by every other instance that they've managed to bully and cajole into their censorship network. (This is easy to see, make a new account and get banned from Blahj. Look at your modlog and you'll see pages of other non-Blahj communities that automatically ban you within seconds).

        They don't want the ability to ban users from Blahj, they want the ability to dictate to other instances which users should be banned. It has nothing to do with creating safe communities, they have all of the tools that they need to do that.

        This is the very essence of power tripping.

  • I feel like this community serves a great purpose. And I'm a massive fan of drinking my tea and reading all the drama it attracts. But I am just beyond tired of the same handful of commenters popping up to always agree with whoever is opposed to blahaj.

    I give this one a YDI. Anybody posting anything transphobic who gets caught by Ada is gonna be banned. Any instance with a mod or admin who makes transphobic posts or comments will get defederated. No one is entitled to having their content served on Ada's servers, and the people who join blahaj know that, and seem to appreciate it.

    Which is sort of why I always wind up agreeing with her. Her server has clear, concise beliefs, and clear, concise administration, and she has the clear-throated consent of her governed or they would leave.

    The only server whose vibe I appreciate more is divide by zero. Shout-out to what I feel is the most neurospicy, nonconformist bunch of pirates I ever met.

  • Borderline YDI.

    Reasoning for that is that the decision to defederate is one that is in line with the stated goals of blahaj. They have made it clear that they will defederate, ban, or otherwise use the available lemmy tool to allow blahaj to serve as a safe, sheltered place for people that are under siege by the world at large.

    Ergo, this can't be a power trip as it isn't arbitrary, or outside of stated goals. Were I a blahaj admin, I would have taken similar steps to maintain the instance as intended, even though I tend to look on defederation as a last ditch tool in general. You can't maintain a truly safe space without aggressive defenses.

    If blahaj was established as a general purpose instance, this would be power tripping. But it wasn't, and isn't a general instance. It's like beehaw was; they're using lemmy as the underpinning software, but the instance has a different goal than the typical ones. The federation status is one that's nice but not necessary for the instance to achieve its primary goal.

    This is more equivalent to a forum blocking links to breitbart, only at a bigger scale; curation rather than control for control's sake.

    However, I want to make it clear that .uk didn't do anything wrong as an instance. That's why it's "borderline" YDI. It's only YDI in the sense that the instance policy is incompatible with the instance goals of blahaj. The decision to aggressively moderate dog whistles is a difficult one, as dog whistles change over time, and are not always something every admin is going to hate resources to do.

    Now, once you're aware of a dog whistle, you have a few choices. One is to hide your head in the sand and pretend it isn't anything at all. Another is to remove that specific occurrence, and do nothing else. You can delay a decision until you have time to verify that it is a dog whistle (you don't have to just accept someone's word that it is, no matter who is saying it). You can choose to not give a fuck. You can even agree with the dog whistle and directly support it. You'd be an asshole if you chose that option, but it is an option.

    And there's in betweens of all those.

    The .uk admin decided to refer to their standing policy and take no action. Since it is a standing policy, it isn't a direct support for the bigotry, only an expression of some factor that leads them to choose not to tale actions outside of instance policy. That factor may be something unpleasant, but that's not the same as being something like bigotry, or even apathy. We don't have anything at the time I'm writing this book from a .uk admin giving further insight. In other words, while I don't agree with their choice, they didn't do anything wrong either, unless there's some evidence of bigotry on their end. And no, just not agreeing to remove a single comment or post is not enough evidence to determine that.

    From my end of things, though I won't go far into it because I don't believe in derailing the main goal of this community, dog whistles are so common now, and have been so effective that they get picked up by people that aren't expressly bigoted, they should be as aggressively monitored as possible. But nobody can keep up with all of them, even just one targeted branch of the practice. I try to keep track of the ones that are most relevant to my personal areas of militancy, and I keep running into new ones because the people creating them change them so frequently. But, when reported, they should be taken seriously, and after confirmation, be treated just the same as slurs and other hate speech. I also recognize that nobody is obligated to act before confirmation, and that it may not always be possible to confirm that a newish dogwhistle is one. It takes time for such knowledge to circulate.

    • There is only one part I don't agree with...

      .uk didn't do anything wrong as an instance.

      Inaction is also an action. I read that inaction as implicit support, regardless of any statements otherwise.

      • Fair enough.

        If I may, allow me to explain why I think it was a not wrong decision. Now, notice how I phrased it this time, please. It is definitely different in implication from my original phrasing, and that does represent some thought that has occurred since the time of the comment.

        .uk is run by multiple admins. It is run as something between a collective and something akin to a democracy within the admin team. When it comes to making a decision for the instance that would require a change to policy, or a deviation from policy, a single admin making the decision without consulting the others would be a bet difficult choice.

        It would require that admin to explain their decision going against established policy, possibly creating a big problem, one that could result in long term instability for the instance, possibly even the breaking of an instance.

        A single admin holding to policy means that the instance is running as intended. The policies may need changing, but it isn't a decision that is an emergency. There's plenty of time for admins to discuss things, debate, weigh possibilities, come up with a plan, verify the plan would be effective, maybe even explore the possibilities publicly.

        A delay is not a bad thing, when the issue is one that requires a change to policy. Since the admins have stated that they are discussing it, and that their reason for delay isn't support for the comments in question, their decision to move slowly is not wrong as an instance. To the contrary, with it not being an emergency, it's the smart decision.

        Now, I'll also say that the specific admin Ada contacted has publicly stated that they're concerned about running afoul of UK regulations, and thus are weighing that in as part of any decisions regarding policies on dogwhistles as a form of transphobia, I'll add that the specific admin did not make a wrong decision either.

        However! As an individual admin, they did do something wrong, but not about the decision itself. Poor communication about internal matters when dealing with a credible issue reported by a reliable and known member of the fediverse that is also an admin and would understand even the most barebones explanation was a bad decision. I hesitate to call it wrong, but it fits that word well enough in this context for it to be acceptable, imo.

        So, o would amend my previous opinion "didn't do anything wrong as an instance" to "didn't make a wrong decision as an instance", as it more accurately reflects both the events as known to me at this time, and my opinion on those events. I hope it obvious that if more information comes to light, that opinion could, and almost certainly would, change if the new information was relevant to the previous events.

        I say it that way because if .uk decided to just allow dogwhistles to go unchallenged and to stay up because of that, it would be wrong, in my opinion; but it wouldn't change whether or not previous actions were appropriate or not unless there was an indication that was the intent all along.

        Now, I also have to say that inaction being implicit support isn't true in all cases all the time, and that statements do matter (or should) in coming to the conclusion that that is what's occuring, but I don't think anyone has to agree with me on those two subjects. They're tangential to the issue here, in c/ptb to begin with, and I do believe that when the issue is dogwhistles, it does hold true with certain criteria met, so I agree in this case anyway.

    • A reasoned and balanced analysis. Bravo.

126 comments