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.
The way I see it, free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences for what you say. You're free to walk up to the friend group and act like a jackass and personally insult everyone. And they're free to tell you to fk off and stop being friends with you and talking to you. That's not an infringement on your right to free speech, that's consequences for your actions.
These 'free speech' people act like the real world is this place where you can just approach and interrupt any conversation and enter any club without following the rules. They act like groups of like minded people getting together to share interests and ideas without wanting to constantly defend themselves and 'debate' their interests and beliefs is some new thing brought to us by the woke agenda.
And so they think social media should be this place where you can say whatever to whoever, wherever you want and if anyone has a problem with that, they're just anti 'free speech' woke libs or some shit.
The fact that they're more concerned with being able to spout off harmful words than they are about the actual wellbeing of people says it all. They hate consequences because they know exactly what the consequences of their actions should be. Never concerned with giving others the same legitimacy they whinge about getting; only about taking it away.