I was recently talking to some friends about Lemmy and the whole Fediverse idea, as it seemed like a really cool part of the Internet. As I was talking about it, though, I realized how unusually friendly this whole place is, and I joked that I “surprisingly haven’t found any bigotry.”
I’m wondering if anyone has come across that, by any chance. If it’s rare, my guess is that even though it’s decentralized, each instance has a set of rules and values that are shared throughout the Fediverse, and I’m guessing it’s easy to defederate with any seedy communities haha.
So honest question.
Lets say someone comes along and says “Woman are adult human females”. A trans person reports this and tells you that it’s a dog whistle, and the person saying that is a TERF.
What would you do?
This is a question that would makes me feel out of my depth as a moderator. My first thought would be to see if there’s a community where I could fnid help in how to handle this appropriately.
And that’s kind of what I mean.
To any trans person, that phrase is a klaxon. It’s an alarm bell that tells us the person we’re talking to is actively transphobic.
So we report it, the mod or admin who isn’t trans feels out of their depth, the trans person doesn’t have the spoons to explain it, and the transphobe stays in place, now empowered to keep their transphobia going, as long as they keep it at the level where most admins and mods don’t recognise it.
And that’s what the threadiverse feels like now.
But on microfedi, there is a much greater awareness of these things, and someone saying that would be dropped or defederated from most instances very quickly