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.
So everyone involved seems to agree that transphobia is bad, but the dude had an idiotic notion of what constituted transphobia.
I feel that if we are in the business of defederating anyone who fails a purity test then lemmy will be quite small indeed.
I will defederate from any instance with admins that excuse transphobia. If that makes our part of the Fediverse quite small, that sucks, but it is what it is. I moved here to get away from social media that won't take action on transphobia. I'm not suddenly going to decide it's ok if it means we get more traffic.
Not talking back or being snarky but if you feel that way you might seriously want to look into Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, they have very bad track records of letting transphobes and bigots run wild, Lemmy.world is the worst, many of the people they've banned for bigotry have been unbanned or were only given temporary bans to begin with, often times they won't even action users who are engaging in transphobia, even if reported. It's really not great.
I used to believe Beehaw was a bit overly strict but honestly I can see they blocked these instances for good reason, especially Lemmy.world.
Imo shitjustworks is the worst offender because they have a whole "muh free speech" thing going and they also were the choice for where a load of rightwing and rightwing adjacent subreddits decided to migrate to like r/greentext, r/NCD, r/conservative and r/libertarian
As I said in my other reply. I don't live that life so we might not get all the cues but if anyone on our team sees transphobia it will be removed.
I think a bigger problem is that like Reddit or Facebook Lemmy.world lets these people continue to post and participate there, most only get temporary bans, I distinctly remember a person who used the R-slur multiple times and was blatantly transphobic, yet last I checked he only got temp banned, and otherwise are completely welcome back even after such atrocious behavior.
One user I can refer to is Mojave, but he certainly isn't the only case, there are plenty more like him. I remember he had quite the abusive spree in !egg_irl@lemmy.blahaj.zone, if memory serves he made quite a few transphobic attacks, unfortunately it doesn't show up in the modlog because they purged him rather than removing (he also apparently had some very bad behavior in !transfem@lemmy.blahaj.zone but I'm not there and don't remember it).
In defense of temp bans: sometimes people will learn from their past mistakes so starting with a temp ban is a decent idea rather than just jumping to a permanent one.
Of course on Lemmy you don't get notifications when you get banned, so it's not as effective of a tool as it could be. Hell you don't even get notifications of a comment being removed.
Edit: Banning in general on Lemmy is broken IMO. If you're from a different instance and you get banned you see no difference in your day to day interaction in the other instance. You can still post and comment, it's just on the other instance you are banned from the people on that instance don't see that content. Couple that with the lack of notifications when you get banned or your comments get removed and people won't know that their behavior is unacceptable and they won't change.
I understand completely. A space like that needs to exist.
Thank you for the work you put in.
best instance and best admins
And this is why blåhaj zone is the best lemmy instance, I'm so glad I found this place.
I'm okay with that. The smaller lemmy is, the better it is for me.