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.
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.
[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can’t see this comment anymore]
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 [email protected], 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 [email protected] but I’m not there and don’t remember it).