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.
I think the rules here are just fine. If I were to to sum it up, just don’t be bigoted towards minority people. I don’t get how that is difficult to grasp.
If you clicked your way onto this specific community, you would had have to have atleast some knowledge of the the LGBTQ+ community, how to treat them etc.
The guidelines aren’t hard to grasp either, first they ask you to have empathy for minority groups, so that right there is telling you that you need to have some kind of understanding for minorities, where they come from, and what they might expect from others. Such as being called the correct pronouns.
Even if you didn’t know ahead of time, you could always ask and listen. Do some research, right? the internet can be used as a research tool?
The inclusion and acceptance part of the guidelines, Is so clear however, I don’t think it needs more explaining, ‘don’t be bigoted’ is so common place Lemmy, let alone the Fediverse. Which is why it just seems to me, that if you made your way to this server that you should know what is expected, or at the least, you should know to not treat minorities badly, because these types of guidelines are such common place on Lemmy. Even on Reddit, this isn’t exactly an unknown concept.