I've seen a lot of instances of people on Lemmy saying you can get banned from Blahaj for forgetting someone's pronouns. And then Ada has to come in and explain why they're wrong in their interpretation of the rules. These people were banned for good reasons, they're transphobes. But I think they misunderstand the rules of Blahaj for a legitimate reason.
It's because Blahaj doesn't have rules. It has two guidelines. Very subjective ones. People want to know what will get them banned, so they try to understand the rules of that subjectivity. The rules for what Ada considers to be empathy and inclusion. The rules of Ada's psychology. Because like it or not, with highly subjective guidelines, Ada's interpretation and understanding of that subjectivity is the rules.
And Ada didn't write the rules of her psychology in the sidebar. So people have to speculate. And people are speculating wrong, and starting arguments about it.
I think a ruleset should be a transparent explanation of how a mod team thinks about acceptable behaviour. By not having rules, Blahaj is being opaque about how the mod team thinks. And the only way for people to deal with that is to practice amateur psychoanalysis. Which is unpleasant and creates division.
If people understood how trans people think about acceptable behaviour, they wouldn't be transphobes. So the result of this system is that everyone who is banned for transphobia doesn't understand why and needs it personally explained to them. If the sidebar explained acceptable behaviour in a way everyone can understand, they wouldn't misunderstand it so often.
I think the current system is creating pointless drama.
Another way to look at the blahaj guidelines,
Not all laws are strictly like one way rules, hadn't you ever heard of vague laws op? I might be stretching it, but vague laws happen to act more like guidelines in practice. So even these government laws that you are using for your perceived benefit for your push of change, doesn't 100% align with your claims and what you are wanting from the mod team of this instance.
In most cases I know laws are more like rules, but vague laws do exist. What the mods are presenting are like vague laws. But really, most of it is really just common sense, just put two pieces to the puzzle together it's easy to avoid doing the wrong thing. Most of the puzzle is already in front of you, and then you just use some common sense thinking, and research.
With anything that isn't 100% definent, you need to look at the road before you cross, you need to read signs, you need to research what they are telling you is expected, as is written. This interpretation, that is open up is really just, a common sense view where they can just look at a given scenario and just moderate based on that.