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).
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!