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.
Just because there’s a workaround doesn’t make it not a problem.
It’s like the Right in the US saying ‘Well if you don’t want to be deported, you can just leave’, while technically true… it doesn’t mean that the administration is doing things which are morally defensible.
People who benefit from having an account on blahaj, aren’t going to use that same account to go “out in the world” to fight their fight.
Especially because the worst among the kind of people they deal with, are the type to send death threats to their DMs. If another instance fails to moderate that, or any lesser type of attack, defederation is the only recourse.
Blahaj is being run exactly the way it should be, to maintain its goals.
That the admin reaches out to other admins and mods, is simply a courtesy, aimed to maintain as much federation as possible without compromising the mission.
And before you suggest that blahaj should simply moderate the entire fediverse from their end, that is not actionable advice. Blahaj needs to maintain a moderation surface area that they can actually keep up with, and hence they have to rely on the instances they federate with to match their standards, where applicable.
The kind of people you’re talking about are not going to be affected by Blahj defederating feddit.uk. If a person is looking to commit harassment then they’re going to make a new account and no amount of defederation will prevent this (unless Blahj, like Beehaw, goes private) because it is trivial to make an accounts on non-blocked instances.
They don’t need to moderate the entire fediverse, they only need to moderate their communities.
In this situation, what is the goal here? What purpose is served, from the point of view of a Blahj users if another user, who isn’t a Blahj user and isn’t commenting in Blahj communities is banned from a non-Blahj instance? Users can already block instances, communities and individuals on their own. Users can already choose to only see local Blahj communities if they want to ensure that they’re in a safe space and the Blahj admins have full control over the Blahj communities.
The Blahj admin’s opinion doesn’t matter when the topic is a non-blahj user, in a non-blahj community. They’re certainly free to block whoever they want, or not; and federate with who they want to or not.
But, in the context of “Are they power tripping or not”, choosing to defederate an instance simply because an admin brushed them off puts it squarely in the “power tripping” pile. It wasn’t that feddit.uk was suddenly the source of a lot of transphobic attacks, or that they allow bigotry… it was that feddit.uk has different moderation practices then Blahj and refused to change them. It’s petty and power tripping.
I’m not going to continue paraphrasing things I’ve already said until you get it.
You are under several misconceptions about what is good for the users of blahaj and the fediverse at large.
Blahaj would absolutely go private given no other option, but for now they are able to work with most of the mods and admins of the fediverse, so they don’t need to. They can have their cake, and eat at least some of it, too.
For blahaj to ask other instances “hey, will you uphold this standard, if not, we don’t have the bandwidth to be doing it for you on our end, so if you aren’t, we need to know so we can make a decision on whether to federate” is not a fucking power trip.
It’s a completely reasonable moderation practice, and they aren’t interested in letting things get out of hand before they cut a given line. What’s wrong with that?
