https://hexbear.net/post/2226865
You can find further details on how the survey was conducted here (yes I was drunk the whole time). 158 people responded yes or maybe. Noticed the survey here recently and wanted to share.
https://hexbear.net/post/2226865
You can find further details on how the survey was conducted here (yes I was drunk the whole time). 158 people responded yes or maybe. Noticed the survey here recently and wanted to share.
Why is hexbear defederated?
I’ll give you the elevator pitch version, because it was a whole thing. In short, Blahaj was one of the first instances that hexbear federated with when they enabled federation. But then they encountered the 196 community, which is very anti hexbear/tankies. A huge fight erupted, with dogpiles and harassment. We talked about defederating hexbear, but they defederated from us before we could.
Dang…I did see a lot of tankie shit in the meta thread. That’s too bad it happened like that. Always makes me sad when there’s infighting among trans people.
as a mod of c/traa on hexbear, yeah if it were me id love to just to link all the trans comms together. having them all split just increases workload and burnout on trans mods of all instances dealing with transphobia and spreads out the trans community too much. this is why we have 23 mods on c/traa, to spread out the annoyance and remove bad content before any vulnerable people see it. we usually remove bad stuff within 5 minutes, no matter the timezone. its also more democratic, less cliquey, and we regularly ask people to mod with no requirement other than being trans/adjacent. in fact, if you asked to mod on c/traa id add you in a heartbeat
there were also some significant issues with dm harassment from 196 users towards trans women, and we’re extremely overprotective of our vulnerable users so we’re much more likely to pull the plug on federation than other instances if even a few infractions have happened without people being banned/posts removed from that instance.
if it was possible to federate with only the trans communities here, i feel like everyone would agree with it.
That sucks that happened with 196. I blocked it pretty much the day I got Lemmy because I found the content annoying. It seems so out of place on this instance. My experience on here has been good so far.
I agree with you that most people would want to unite if it were only the trans communities on here. The more people, the more support and resources.
Grain of salt: the Hexbear admins fail to mention any “DM harassment of trans women” (from 196 or blahaj) in their defederation announcement, which seems like a huge detail to leave out if you’re defederating over alleged transphobia.
And spinning stuff like that is why I don’t trust people trying to upsell Hexbear 🤷♂️
Most defederation announcements don’t usually assign a cause, a user usually requests it in a thread and then the admins bring it to a vote if it gets enough attention. I personally voted to stay with blahaj but with the addendum that we ban all regular 196 posters and mods. If you search around you can see a handful of people posting personal experiences with harassment from 196 here. Its been a long time but I recall getting sexually harassed as well, though that user did eventually get banned here much later.
Out of the hundred or so very active trans commenters, only 5 voted to stay federated with blahaj, me included. Though some trans people were very hurt by this, so ultimately I was fine with defed, I voted to stay federated mostly for trans unity reasons.
For anyone interested, the Hexbear defederation announcement thread with the specific reasons for defederation listed can be read here.
Yeah theres a handful of other associated threads related to this topic too. Technically Tomboyshulk referencing chasers in that post was referring to the DM harassment of trans women.
https://hexbear.net/post/1592846
https://hexbear.net/post/373222
There was a refed post where the second one came up. They made a refed post due to a new lemmy feature coming out
yeah i block it on this account too. far too jarring and it clogs out all the cool lgbt stuff.
im also very serious about my offer to add any trans people here as a mod on c/traa btw. hit me up if you want it 🤣
we even have a super secret evil group chat
I appreciate the offer, but I’ve really got my hands full moderating six different communities on here.
yeah feel that. i do just one and its annoying enough
At risk of starting it back up again by oversimplifying, there was a contingent of Hexbear users starting shit over here and claiming blahaj was transphobic because they didn’t believe the admins responded to reports fast enough (ie, while they were asleep in Australia). When the admins polled the blahaj user base on whether or not we wanted to defederate and it became obvious that the majority of users wanted to defederate, Hexbear decided to declare that to “protect their users from transphobia” they would
take their ball and leave firstdefederate from blahaj. Part of this was trying to convince everyone on their way out the door that all the trans users should migrate to Hexbear, because they’re soooo much less transphobic 🙄It left a really nasty taste in my mouth and I trust very little about anyone that comes here talking positively about Hexbear given how absolutely shit flinging the whole thing was. If you want to view it in more detail the relevant threads are in !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone if you go back far enough.
Ughhhh I hate trans infighting. Why’d they have to be asses.
And geez, that’s the dumbest complaint. The blahaj admins clearly try hard to do their jobs. What did they expect them to do, never sleep? Entitled behavior. If they want things done faster, they should have offered to help or find help.
At the risk of an argument, I don’t think its entitled to want an extremely secure place that catches transphobia almost instantly. Trans people imo deserve a place that is theirs. A lot of people in the trans community are very suicidal and deal with a lot of pain and isolation IRL, having a community to go to where they don’t have to interact with transphobic bullshit, concern trolling, etc. is a good way to make these people feel more connected and find ways to build support (cheers intro begins playing). There’s a lot of ways to make sure this happens, for instance, good mod tools, bots catching bad behavior, an aggressively supportive userbase, and massive mod teams.
Also, Hexbear isn’t just an instance, we regularly do mutual aid. I’ve personally helped 3 homeless trans people get housing via hexbear. And of course I really hope blahaj can do similar too. Its always great to have a backup if something implodes, and its even better if its not a corporate controlled community.
Entitled wasn’t the right word for me to use. I meant moreso that it’s not wholly realistic. I agree with you that trans people deserve a place to not see that stuff, but I’ve had times where I’ve removed comments the second it was posted and two days later I’d still be getting reports because of third party readers with slower refresh rates.
Everybody’s working hard to get this place modded more efficiently. This community is only about two months old so we’re still trying to figure things out. Most of the stuff that I’ve had to remove on here requires more investigation than your typical auto mod can catch, although we do have an auto blacklist flagging system. I do want to ensure that this is a safe place for trans people to express themselves.
I’m glad that hexbear has been able to help people out with mutual aid. I passionately believe in the concept of mutual aid. We recently had someone who very well could have ended up homeless and in danger but the community pulled together to get them financial help and a place to stay. I hope that similar outcomes can happen for people who are in need in the future. We have a support network and community in the works right now.
Yeah my advice would be to just regularly ask if anyone wants to mod, imo. Makes the community more active as a whole because more people get more invested.
Yeah I saw that. Was gonna reply myself but looked like the situation was handled. A lot of people really get the concept of mutual aid wrong, some people think its just charity. But no, helping out homeless people means they can also help others in turn. I hooked one of the homeless trans folks I met up with a commune that needed a cook, the people there had missing arms and stuff but had an extra room. So the homeless trans person learned how to cook and everything is going peachy and cute!
I love talking to people all the time so one of the side benefits is I sometimes know people with extra rooms that can help out like this.
Timezones are a fuck but what was left out of the below response was:
I messaged Ada to ask the 196 mods if they would consider removing the “fuck tankies” banner as multiple trans users expressed they didn’t feel welcome due to being labeled a tankie (it is a generic insult for anyone more left than the person using the word, anarchists have been called it). She said that she didn’t feel comfortable doing that, which is valid, and said I could DM them.
I DMed them asking if they would consider removing the banner and explained why. I did not get a response, instead a screenshot of my DM was pinned to the community along with an ableist slur. This DM leak post/slur was left up for over a day, finally the moderator used paint to partially obscure the image and put up a passive-aggressive comment about being tone policed.
All the mod had to do was say “lol no, fuck tankies” and I would’ve dropped it, but it is a huge red flag when someone in charge of stewarding a community on an instance dedicated to marginalized people (which I am) chooses to publically ridicule rather than talk. This is after I asked the community mods of the dunk tank to change their rules to ensure that no other admins or mods could be posted to the community, which they did and the “people of NATO” post that referenced a lemmy.blahaj admin/mod was removed.
That mod is still on the 196 team, while anyone doing such a thing on hexbear would be demodded and permabanned. I think ultimately there is a significant disconnect between moderation expectations and actions resulting in the sustained defederation. We’ve put up user polls on refederation twice since this happened, and hexbear users overwhelmingly do not wish to refederate.
I am saddened by this in part because I think Ada is a great person and that the instance is great, other than 196. With transphobia a problem in a large part of the lemmy-verse supporting each other and sticking together despite any political disagreements is very important and look forward to cultivating a thriving, safe, and positive trans space in this corner of the fediverse with all of you.
The only thing I will add to that is that once I became aware of the leaked DM, I removed the post myself, contacted the lead mod and made it clear that posting DMs without permission is not acceptable.
I don’t feel it was something that warranted demoting or removal, unless the action is repeated, which it has not been. I agree that reposting it blanked out with passive aggressive comments didn’t help anything, but by the same token, neither did the active dog piling that several of our users (including myself) received from Hexbear, most/all of whom are still active. Just as you disagree with the Blahaj moderation expectations in regards to 196, I disagree with the Hexbear moderation expectations in regards to dogpiling and harassment. Norms tolerated on Hexbear would get someone banned from Blahaj very quickly. I watched as you tried to work around the dunking culture just enough so that we could work together, and I watched as your efforts failed.
I won’t defend the actions of some of our users in the events that went down, yet I feel that many Hexbear users seem to gloss over the actions from many of their community members. Hexbear was not an innocent party in this.
For all of that, trans solidarity is incredibly important to me, and like you, I would refederate with Hexbear if it were simply up to me, because I think trans solidarity is worth striving for, but like Hexbear, Blahaj users are strongly against refederating, and it seems like a bad choice to enforce “solidarity”, because at that point, it isn’t solidarity.
And on a final note, despite the fact we never resolved this situation, working with you as we tried to resolve it was a moment of positivity in an otherwise shitty series of events. You do Hexbear proud
I would say you can check my post history if you want details, but it was a pretty divisive and heated disagreement about whether we would continue to be federated or not with them. There were a lot of reasons though.