As posted about recently in [email protected] and [email protected] it seems that @[email protected]'s stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don't think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it's open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it's very likely they won't have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can't speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn't inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven't seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don't want to see that, don't open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I'd really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj's local community on this, I'm not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren't from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
That is partially why I opened this thread. A community discussion is something that could be beneficial here in deciding what to do. There could be a lot of fallout from defederation though I don't feel like it would be particularly bad since most communities on Lemmy.ml are already a thing elsewhere, and have more users there too, and most people who want to be here already have accounts here or would very quickly and easily make accounts here or on an instance that federates with us.
Although I don’t agree with nutomic’s stance (nor do I have any previous experience with them) the tone and language isn’t rude. It’s important to take that into consideration. There’s a difference between discussing opinions and just mindlessly slinging insults.
Regardless of the tone, the opinions he is discussing and the ways that he represents his views are inherently transphobic. He and his views are a threat to us at Blahaj Lemmy, being a space for queer folks (many of us are trans). He is also the lead developer of Lemmy, and the head admin of lemmy.ml. A statement does not have to be framed as a direct insult to be hateful and harmful, and the fact that these views of his have been persistent, along with his influence, means that he as a user is dangerous. Hence why he has been banned from this instance. The question being discussed is really if his views are reflected into the community and moderation at lemmy.ml, because that is the point at which the instance is harmful enough to defederate from. If lemmy.ml is a place where transphobia is allowed to propagate, then that is immensely harmful for us. We need to protect ourselves against transphobia.
All I ask is that it not be ignored completely. I’m not close enough to the situation to make any decisions.
I can promise that it is not being ignored here. It is being considered fully for the transphobic garbage that it is, which is why Nutomic is banned instance-wide since 9 months ago when his DM leaked.
lol I didn’t realize that he’d already gotten himself banned. Never mind.
I mean, the two big communities for me are [email protected] and [email protected], though the latter of which isn't really active anyway so I wouldn't be sad to see it go. There isn't a suitable replacement for the Linux community elsewhere, and that's honestly what I'm most active on, but if we defeferate, I'd probably just cut my losses. Yes, it is easy for people to create new accounts, but the hassle is that you cannot transfer your comments or posts to a new account, so you lose that history (as I've had to deal with). But overall, I think most people on ml would just stop seeing posts from our instance and never think about it. It would be a small minority that would even notice, but the majority would be getting less content from diverse voices in the queer community overall. Again, it would just take a lot of consideration.
What about [email protected] or [email protected]? Those seem decently active.
That is a minor drawback. It would be nice if they implemented ownership transfer abilities for posts and comments, though it'll probably be a while before we see that.
I can see how and why this would be a problem and why this should be carefully considered, that can be a poor outcome. I guess the same can be said for any defederation including the feddit.uk one. It all depends I guess on how they handle these issues going forward and also how they handle this subject overall. If a lot of the people there are "I support trans people but I don't think kids..." (you get the idea) it doesn't really do much good to federate with them. At least in my opinion.
The former of the two (which is also the larger of them) has 13% of the userbase, although you're correct that it does seem fairly active. I suppose that would be a decent place to migrate to if defederation were to happen, although I tend to mostly help out new users, who tend to flock to the larger community. Again, I'd figure it out if it happened, it wouldn't actually be a problem. The latter of the two I would not consider very active by comparison.
Yes, this is one of the grievances I had when migrating here from lemmy.world, as I have some very detailed and helpful comments I wish were easier for me to find. I'd love to see that as a feature in the future, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Yes, I agree here. What I suppose I'm basically trying to say is that defederation is an extreme option, so it has to be considered carefully. If the community on ml starts to reflect transphobic views, then absolutely that would warrant defederation. But if it's a single admin, and it's otherwise being moderated to remove transphobic content, then I do think it's really difficult to determine without a lot more consideration. In most other situations, banning a single transphobic user may be sufficient. It all depends on how his views are reflected in the moderation and the content of the community as a whole. If it's resulting in transphobia, then it becomes a much more clear case. I don't have enough information to know if that is in fact the case.
yeah. i mean isn’t this what downvotes and bans are for? instead of defederation?
There are also plenty of other reasons to defed from them as well, I made a post here a few days ago recaping that as well as links to some documentation of it
Blahaj.zone doesn't enable downvotes. As for bans. Sure. If it's a handful of one-off users. But if this speaks to the larger instance culture on .ml that's where defederation is considered, and because it's one of the lead admins, it speaks to their ability and willingness to keep their instance safe.
Personally, I would make the argument that Lemmy.ml, as the flagship server, has a culture far less impacted by the admin/developers views then any other instance.
I'm not wedded to that though. Consider it more a theory then a statement of fact.
If they were more hands off I would agree but they do a lot of modding from the admin chair.
lemmy.blahah.zone does not allow downvotes. And the concern is moreso that some transphobic content wouldn't be moderated (based on nutomic's views), hence the burden of moderation would come down to our instance's admins, and that simply shouldn't be their responsibility. Defederation is for situations in which the instance in question is harmful to the community in the instance defederating. And if transphobia is not properly moderated, and transphobic views are allowed to spread, then that is actively harmful to lemmy.blahaj.zone.
gotcha. i figured all posts could be up/downvoted. kinda still new here.
Context for why they're blocked here
gotcha. thanks!