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.
======
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.
If he actually said “trans people are too sensitive and this is why no one likes you” I’d be right there with you. He didn’t say that, though. Maybe that’s what it meant, but it’s not the read I got. He said that getting offended at him [for making a mistake] was not helping their case.
Yeah, he should have handled it differently, but it’s not “trans people are too sensitive and this is why no one likes you”, it’s “we’re in an argument and you’re getting upset at me for something I couldn’t have known.”
Because she didn’t just tell him her pronouns, she accused him of misgendering her intentionally, in a discussion where they’re already attacking each other back and forth so it easily reads as another attack to someone who’s not used to being told pronouns.
And I mean fuck, maybe he’s really a monster beneath all of that. But I don’t think that what we’ve been shown is enough to condemn him and know what type of person he is. It certainly isn’t enough to condemn an entire instance in my opinion.
Maybe I give people too much credit, but defederation is a big deal and I haven’t seen people talking about other instances of transphobia either from this admin or other people on the instance, so it seems like there’s a good chance that it’s a miscommunication.
Oh I agree with most of this. If you look up my top comment, I don’t support defederation over this. This is something that needed to be handled at the community mod level.
He’s not a monster. He’s just a normal guy. He reacted poorly and he has some low hanging fruit in personal growth roadmap he can take care of. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t done similar things online and worse, albeit in different contexts.
In the end, it comes down whether you trust the instance admins as a whole and the instance administration processes. I don’t get the impression that he operates as a dictator that abuses admin rights to settle personal slap fights. I get the impression administrating programming.dev is a team effort.