Update: In light of the programming.dev update here https://programming.dev/post/8399272, the defederation is no longer going ahead.
However, something more needs to be said. Even here on Blahaj, some of our users took issue with the choice to defederate over this issue.
So I would like to give some background and context.
Blahaj Zone exists, because both Kaity and I left mainstream social media to escape transphobia. Reddit, with its lackluster approach to fighting transphobia, and twitter, with its outright celebration of transphobia pushed us here, to the fediverse, and to create Blahaj Zone and Blahaj Lemmy.
To that end, we will continue to treat transphobia seriously. Our goal is to create a space where gender diverse folk can exist and let our defenses down a little, where we don’t have to worry about getting dragged in to an argument with a transphobe, or a bad faith actor “just asking questions”.
If you are looking for a more reddit like experience, where in the interest of increased engagement, we let low level transphobia slide, and push responsibility for dealing with it on to community mods and individual users, then you will likely not be happy with blahaj going forward. If you choose to stay here, understand that we may defederate again in the future over similar issues.
The choice is yours.
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It has recently been brought to my attention that the lead admin of programming.dev is engaging in ongoing transphobia.
You can see the conversation in question here https://programming.dev/comment/6131539
For that reason we will be defederating from programming.dev in 48 hours.
There are only three communities on that instance used by small number of our users, so this won’t have a big impact, but if you are one of those users, you will need to use an alt account on another instance if you wish to access the communities.
I don’t particularly oppose the decision to defederate. I have been vacillating on unsubbing from two of my programming.dev communities because of extremely poor social experiences and the third one hardly gets any posts. So if anything you are saving me the annoyance of having to do anything. But I genuinely do not understand.
Maybe the really ghastly stuff has been removed, but what I’m reading right now is pretty much what I consider to be baseline behavior on gaming communities on servers where GaMeRs congregate. Am I setting my standards too low?
Maybe the mods deleted some really horrible comments, but that’s moderation working as intended. Does it really warrant further action? Specifically this drastic?
Am I underestimating the risks we run by staying federated with an instance with hostile admins? Are there things they do/can do/could do that could cause us major problems?
I mean yeah, the guy seems like a rude abrasive idiot that condones some pretty horrible stuff to justify playing his wizard game. But this is literally the first post of his I have the displeasure to read. if I can block his account and keep reading the content on his instance that’s not complete crap, why wouldn’t I want to?
But coming from their lead admin, who is ultimately responsible for the stance the instance takes on issues like this.
The goal for Blåhaj Lemmy is a space where gender diverse folk can let their defences down a bit, where they know that transphobia will be stopped in its tracks.
I can see that this is a bad omen for the level of support trans users can expect over there. I can imagine you’re not comfortable waiting for the other shoe to drop.
That’s pretty much it, yeah