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.
I think we have a fundamental difference in understanding in what defederation is, as a tool for admins to use.
While it should be the last tool to pull out, the entire point of it is to limit the spread of problematic content on an instance level.
This means that, if an instance is allowing things to stay up, other instances can defederate all at once instead of planning playing whack-a-mole with individual users.
While we’re currently talking about a situation involving dogwhistles, let’s step to the side and look at the concept itself.
There’s a list of instances recommended for defederation that can be a default. That list includes places that allow kiddie porn, places run by, or catering to nazis and their ilk, and even lemmygrad as an extremist instance.
Why not just block all those users individually instead of defederating?
I hope it’s obvious why not, that it would be a never ending moderation nightmare. The more a given instance is prone to a given kind of situation, regardless of what that might be, the more you have to consider defederation instead of individual bans.
Bringing that back to this situation, the question becomes one of thresholds. What is the right amount of transphobic dogwhistles to allow into an instance that’s by and for trans people?
In this case, Ada has set the threshold low. This has always been the case, so it isn’t something out of the blue.
When an instance is meant to be heavily curated in terms of screening out types of content, an admin is limited in their choices. If the instance has the means to have a big enough team, you can have people actively looking for content that isn’t acceptable and banning users. Or you can use defederation to screen out instances that are prone to the unwanted content.
Since there aren’t any instances with the kind of funding necessary to have a team of full time, 24/7 moderators screening the entirety of lemmy, defederation is the more realistic choice. It is something an admin team can deploy temporarily or permanently as the situation shifts.
So, I think it comes down to thresholds. Blahaj is set up as, and maintained as, a trans first space, a shelter for trans people online. They have a very low threshold because that’s the only way to meet that goal with the resources available to their instance. It seems you believe their threshold to be too low. Fair enough, we’re all allowed to have an opinion on the matter.
I would, however, point you to this very community, and suggest you go back through older posts. Blahaj is brought up frequently for banning users for this very thing. So, if they’re power tripping when they apply preemptive bans to users, and they’re power tripping when they defederate, what tools are they supposed to use? There aren’t any other tools at this point in lemmy development. There’s not even an automod to handle removing content on the fly, before it gets seen.
Iirc, the only filter that lemmy has for that is limited to a small range of slurs, and isn’t editable by admins. My memory may be faulty in that regard; if it is editable, and it can work on content from other instances, then that would be the better tool to use. But, afaik, it can’t do either. Last time I saw an explanation of how it works, it would only stop things on the individual instance, not federated content. Again, unless I misunderstood.
Then you run into the crowd that hates the idea of automod, so let’s be honest here, the blahaj team would be accused of power tripping if they did use something like that.
When it comes down to it, no matter what the blahaj team does, they’re going to catch hell. But the consequences of doing nothing are much worse. And, I’m going to be blunt as fuck here, 90% of the pissiness about blahaj’s rules and decisions catch hell that they either wouldn’t catch, or wouldn’t be as severe, because it’s a trans focused instance.
Do you remember beehaw at all? They completely defederated, and there was less venom towards them than for the selective defederation blahaj does. Admittedly, lemmy was smaller then, and there was venom, but not at the same scale.
Defederation isn’t the tool for this. It’s a low level tool to prevent bad instances, like spam or illegal content, from infecting the rest of the network.
Admins and moderators already have the tools they need to moderate their communities. Instance members who want to stay inside the bubble of increased moderation also have that choice, if a Blahj user clicks ‘Local’ then they will only see communities that are completely under the control and moderation of their local admins. If a user, like the one in the OP, behaves badly then their ban will remove them.
It isn’t the role of an instance admin to moderate all of federated social media. A user can block a community or instance on their own. They do not require an admin to do that for them.
Federation isn’t a moderation tool.
You don’t consider bigotry to be worthy of defederation?
Or is it that you don’t consider dogwhistles a form of bigotry?
Because that’s what Ada was coming to .uk admins about. And, it’s what they say they’re working on a decision about.
I would say it is absolutely the role of every admin to actively moderate bigotry, period. Now, while I definitely consider dogwhistles just as actionable as direct slurs and hate speech, I can’t really expect everyone to agree, but that’s what the issue is about, it isn’t some random thing like discussing football rules. It goes right to the heat of a major social issue.
I would say that issues of bigotry are more important, and more admin attention worthy than spam, since spam is only going to hurt the instances in any realistic scenario. Dogwhistles hurt people, in the real world.
Like, if it’s your opinion that that’s not the case, that’s whatever, but I hope you understand that it is an issue that is a “low level” problem to a lot of people.
