cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/26211900
[Transphobia Warning] Nutomic’s Stance on Transgender People
The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised.
I don’t intend that to be snarky, more jokey. But, yeah, it’s pretty much common knowledge. Not the first time they’ve expressed unpleasant opinions on the subject, though not quite this bluntly. There was a minor kerfluffle over it not too long after the reddit exodus.
And it isn’t unexpected tbh, that’s a pretty bog standard tankie take, if perhaps a tad more trope filled.
To me, lemmy is kinda like a less important version of the Apollo missions. You put up with someone unpleasant because they can get the job done, until things get to the point it can be done without them. German scientists, tankie devs. Yeah, yeah, von Braun wasn’t a “real” nazi; whatever.
At some point, either lemmy gets enough movement to get a less extreme team on board, it gets forked, or something else comes along.
I’ll keep posting about Sublinks as long as Lemmy is primarily developed by people whom suck
How is Sublinks development going? Are they getting close to Lemmy as far as features go? Any stable instances yet?
I’m aware of the project, but haven’t been following it closely the past few months.
I’m on the Matrix space, things are still moving.
No release date yet, and it’s summer so people are on annual leave
One instance admin said they were switching any day now like a month ago 😂.
Ouch 😅
Oh my bad, was just soon
Genuinely curious … what exactly is the problematic stance here?
Is it that they think the boxer was a biological male and therefore trans female? Or is it referring to then as a biological male (which seems justifiably politically incorrect to me but not heinous in trying to point out that the Olympic/bougousie can’t be that transphobic, could honestly be a language problem).
Or is it the statement that the bourgeoisie aren’t trans phobic?
“The transgender topic” is already weird as a statement (kinda like “the gay agenda”, it comes off as only considering it as a political statement?), and “clearly promoted by the bourgeoisie” implies it’s bad.
“As far as […] lgbt flags on government buildings”: it’s… not far at all? Again, weird statement.
“Biological male” is both wrong for the boxer (she’s cis) and generally used for transphobia (trans women on HRT aren’t biological males by any reasonable definition). It’s also generally conspiratorial.
Overall it’s not explicitly transphobic or bad to me, but it shows at minimum a very misinformed perspective.
Overall it’s not explicitly transphobic or bad to me, but it shows at minimum a very misinformed perspective.
Yea that was my impression too. AFAIU, they’re from Europe so there may be a language barrier too. Don’t know how true that is though of course.
Otherwise, tangentially, as far as all the anti-tankie sentiments that may have been prompted by this are concerned, I’ve only seen good culture from them on trans issues.
EDIT: and thanks for the reply!
The idea that trans rights are some kind of bourgeoisie conspiracy.
I personally don’t see that in the statement … at all actually. Maybe they believe that, I don’t know … but I’d need to seem more to believe that.
From the context of the conversation, it seems more like the inversion, where they doubt that transphobia is some kind of bourgeoisie conspiracy given that trans-rights are getting support from enough parts of mainstream society.
Which IMO, as I’ve said in other comments, is a rather superficial angle on the whole thing (from both sides of the posted conversation). There’s undoubtedly a lot of transphobic energy in mainstream society, with plenty of influential people being shitty people about it, but whether it is or isn’t some conspiracy or whatever doesn’t seem like a helpful way of looking at it.
I could of course be wrong and ignorant. It just seems to me like the malice v incompetence dynamic, where most people can be vile for pretty base reasons, without culture playing a big role but without it having to be some conspiracy or organised effort (as the person nutomic was responding to was claiming)
I know that I shouldn’t, but…
Off-topic: why Nutomic's comment is idiotic
It’s a big false dichotomy.
As a class, the bourgeoisie only cares about staying in power. Everything else from its PoV is fluff, to be situationally used or opposed.
And that applies to the trans cause. The bourgeoisie is weakly opposed to trans rights because they get in the way of reproductive labour (trans people are less likely to have children, so they aren’t pumping out as many new proletariats as cis people do). However that opposition is not strong enough to make the bourgeoisie ignore pink money, since pink money is still money and money is still power under capitalism.
It’s also worth noting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t just compete for power with the other two classes (proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie) - it also competes internally. And for that, different factions within the class will seek external support from different groups, and align their discourses to those.
In that situation, what do you expect to see? The bourgeoisie flinging back and forth between lip service towards LGBTQ+ people+communities, and a transphobic discourse. Rainbow-wash something today (it’s a cheap and effective marketing tactic!), go transphobic tomorrow; business A plops up a trans flag, business B tears it down. Flush, repeat.
And, well, it’s exactly what you see here.
I also encourage specifically Trotskyists to read this text, as it explains way better than I could how the transgender agenda and class struggle are not orthogonal in nature. (Stalinists: be warned that Sybil Davis rambles quite a bit against Stalinism.)
And… on a moral level, let’s be frank - you need to be inconsistent like a puddle of jelly, to be a communist but not defend trans rights. At the end of the day, what a good communist should defend is freedom of oppression; and what are those LGBTQ+ activists saying, if not “we don’t want to be oppressed based on gender, sex and sexuality”? It’s all about human rights dammit.
On-topic: I think that the “forums side of the Fediverse” (nowadays mostly Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin) would benefit immensely from additional platforms; that’s why I’m excited for projects like PieFed and SubLinks. I am grateful for the Lemmy software but I can’t help but see the people in charge of the project as a liability.And they would still be a liability even if they had any skill building a healthy community (they don’t, they suck at it). Relying on a single platform is like putting all your eggs within the same basket, once that basket goes down everything breaks.
It’s also worth noting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t just compete for power with the other two classes (proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie) - it also competes internally. And for that, different factions within the class will seek external support from different groups, and align their discourses to those.
And if someone were to ignore that and view them as a single-minded monolith it can easily be explained as divide & conquer tactics.
This too - even monolithic agents can play both sides, or do lip service for one side while supporting the other from the shadows.
And they would still be a liability even if they had any skill building a healthy community (they don’t, they suck at it).
I agree with you here (and generally the whole post, glad to have found it here). While I think they do suck at community building (and might even admit to as much or defend the need for it) I would add that from my perspective the amount of reflexive dog-piling and harsh criticism hurled their way just for or triggered by their being communists/tankies has probably made it pretty difficult. And unfortunately and problematically so I’d say. Now such may just be the way things are and it had to be navigated if they were ever to build a better community … sure. And being open communists may then as just a matter of practical reality hinder their community building capacities. But I feel like it’s worth acknowledging.
Also, their position of opposing a somewhat consumeristic culture of having a demanding relationship with open source developers is also worth recognising. I wasn’t receptive to those arguments in the past, but have since come around to it TBH.
And, the way they’ve approached federation and presenting their own instance has enabled the lemmy-verse to not have a single monolithic community or culture. They chose before the migration to not push their instance as the flagship and never seemed to want that. They always promoted other instances, and have always federated their own instance fairly widely. So in a way, they’ve ensured that they didn’t have to be the primary community builders for the lemmy space, and I think that has paid off rather well given the relatively small user size here (apart from lemmy . world being too big).
I don’t rule out that a lot of the complains are motivated by red scare, instead of saner stuff. And I’m also genuinely grateful for not making
mlthe flagship instance, it would’ve made any problem worse.However I think that, to be a good open source developer, you need to be at least decent at community building. Because a good part of that development is to gather support so other people can submit you code.
Because a good part of that development is to gather support so other people can submit you code.
Yes, for sure … totally agree. I think I saw desalines even acknowledging that they’ve dropped the ball on this somewhat. TBH, from their perspective, I imagine it’s hard to see through the red scare stuff though.
That it’s rust also creates a barrier to entry (I actually started a community for learning rust to help with this and it’s gone ok so far).
But yea, I think they could do with a community manager of some sort. Nutomic in particular seems to have difficulty with engaging with the user base (this post’s source included).
This is the best stated argument I’ve seen by far for alts for Lemmy. Still, I don’t see anything wrong with the statements made being neutral. Not everyone is going to be an ally, but that does not make them an enemy. This post smells like someone trying very poorly thought out psyops instead of simply making their own thing. Lemmy is written in the benchmark of coding languages. The alts appear to target the least secure convenient high level languages. Based on what I’ve seen, I would be quite hesitant to run my own instance on one versus the other. I’ve seen a ton of whining here and there, but I haven’t seen anyone that has an answer to why they have not submitted pull requests for Lemmy. I find that most concerning. There appears to be a desire to steal Lemmy. I find that deeply disturbing. I left for awhile once before because of similar nonsense. If some one can do better, great, go prove it on your own. If your confidence in your abilities does not exceed envy of what already exists, I already feel completely uninterested in the alternative. There is a lot of nonsense about politics that ultimately have nothing to do with the platform. It feels like deeply destabilizing drama that makes this place toxic.
There is still thinly plausible deniability about the psyops nature of this post, but it is too strong of a pattern for me to ignore as chance. The original message chain was not posted. One side of a conversation proves nothing whatsoever and making conclusions about intent without full context is a fool’s folly. The consistent jump to Lemmy alts in comments shows a decided intent and bias.
For context, here’s the original message chain. The discourse conveyed there isn’t just neutral, it’s dismissive - in that chain Nutomic does play down the trans issues and needs.
While we could argue that the original user is jumping at the gun to some extent (and falling into the same idiotic false dichotomy as Nutomic himself), it’s hard to claim that she’s psy ops, after a quick glance of her profile. She simply sounds vocal about the issues that she cares about. I think that it’s the same deal with the OP of this thread, it doesn’t look like psy ops for me.
I ain’t no programmer, so take what I say with a grain of salt: while performance is important I don’t think that it’s the whole deal. One of the benefits of Python is that a lot of people know it, can read its code for issues, and can contribute with the project. (This is not a dichotomy, though - I think that an alternative coded mostly in Python, with Rust on critical parts [to address performance and security] would be the best of all worlds.)
But even another codebase in Rust would do great in my book. Besides the whole deal of relying too much onto a a single basket, every new alternative would bring on new ideas, and try to tackle the same problems in different ways. Kbin for example tried to mix microblogging in. And oddly enough it would be a great way to shut up all those “waah devz r commiez!” complains (“ah, you don’t use software made for commies? Use [alternative] then.”), while still allowing them to reap the benefits through federation and open source.
Honest question: Why does it matter if he’s a transphobe when choosing which Fediverse software to use? The software is FOSS and anyone can make their own instance. I don’t understand why his social views outside of sharing the software and protecting it from becoming proprietary matters when deciding what Fediverse software to use.
I’m not arguing my stance. I really want to understand what I might be missing.
When people are successful, sometimes their ideas are too. They become a sort of standard, or justified. While I speak only for myself, I think some folks feel like if this guy’s projects are successful he could use that success to oppres people. It happened to fluffy JK Rowling.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining. What’s the relevant story with JK Rowling?
JK uses her platform (harry potter fame) to denigrate and oppress trans women (probably more). She regularly engages anti trans exchanges on public twitter. Considering the reach HP has for children, it could give her considerable chance to promote bigotry. Look up TERF.
Honest question: Why does it matter if he’s a transphobe when choosing which Fediverse software to use?
- Because some people have actually financially supported him. I’m not trans, but I would be devastated to know that my money went to feed someone who wants to destroy me.
- I already have trouble convincing transgender people in my social circle that Lemmy as a software is safe for them to use even with the variety of trans-inclusive servers like yours, and will be safe and inclusive in the future.
A great example of (2) is the fate of PolyMC. Thankfully, the other developers forked it into Prism, but transphobia put that whole project in jeopardy for a bit.
The software is FOSS and anyone can make their own instance.
IMO that’s why I’m not immediately dropping my account and running for the hills, but it’s still not good. Most people don’t have the technical skills or the interest in learning them to run their own instance.
I really want to understand what I might be missing.
IMO it’s that even though he does not personally control how Lemmy instances are run, and even though we do have a good degree of robustness to transphobia because the software is FOSS, it is still both morally and technically ill-advised to have a transphobe at the helm of an open-source software project.
I just got banned from !linux@lemmy.ml for posting that screenshot
Welcome to !linux@programming.dev
general rule of thumb is that if you see a .ml community there’s always a better one on another domain even if there’s not.
I will be joining in :)
Linux doesn’t seem like the correct community for it but it could’ve been deleted it’s so weird they would ban you for that
I mean to say that I posted the screenshot from the original post
Update 2:
Just like when hexbear.net called them out on different terrible takes (ie what counts as csam and other awful mods)
Why do they go through the effort of banning people from individual communities when site banning should be enough? It honestly just comes across as vindictive.
@xnx PieFed won’t have an app any time soon due to the way it’s implemented. It’s still awesome without a native app because it’s fast and doesn’t really need direct access to hardware to do its thing.
Tech detail: PieFed is a Python app using Flask and server-side rendered HTML templates. It is super fast as there’s no heavy Javascript framework being used. The maintainer has written about how PieFed is developed with poor internet connections in mind: https://piefed.social/post/6102
The only thing piefed needs for an app is a flask rest framework. It’d not hard
Any chance you will be able to help develop that?
I could but sadly I’ve got my hands full with my other projects atm.
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@skullgiver Good Q. Some thoughts… a standard Python, Flask, PostgreSQL app can handle hundreds of requests per second on a single machine. Any bottlenecks - Lemmy or PieFed - would probably not be at the language yet. For example, Lemmy’s poor performance when I looked ~1 year ago came from a bizarre disregard for things like relational DB query optimisation, HTTP caching, and how the stock frontend lemmy-ui fetched data. Yet Lemmy is written in Rust which is known for speed.
PieFed won’t have an app any time soon due to the way it’s implemented.
Why is that? They seem pretty similar on the surface, so I’m curious differences exist under the hood which would preclude app development.
There isn’t anything stopping this. It’s just that no one is working on an app. And there isn’t any API implemented (yet) for an app to hook in to and fetch posts and comments. Both could be programmed. Someone could also copy the Lemmy API and use arbitrary Lemmy apps with Piefed. I think the developer is open to any of that and I’m pretty sure I read some feature request. It’s just that the focus currently is on other things. And Piefed works well as an progressive web app. You can open it in your browser and click “Add to home screen” and you’ll get an icon and a browser window that pretty much feels like an app. I’m using that and also don’t see any benefit in putting in the effort to maintain an app, when it works well as is.
Both could be programmed. Someone could also copy the Lemmy API and use arbitrary Lemmy apps with Piefed.
This seems like an interesting idea. On one hand, I could see how it could hamper development, but on the other hand, it would be nice if all of the threadiverse platforms (Lemmy, Piefed, Sublinks, Mbin?) were standardized enough that the apps could be interoperable. I think giving users multiple options for how to access and interact with the content would be good for the fediverse as a whole.
That would be nice. In practice, not even ActivityPub as the underlying protocol is standardized enough to ensure interoperability between the microblogging, threaded conversations, videos, etc. As far as I understand, it’s pretty minimal and even voting etc isn’t as standardized as it needed to be. So I don’t have much hope for another protocol being that well-defined and agreed upon, if we don’t even have that.
That being said… ActivityPub defines server to server and client to server communication. I think a good way to tacke this is do away with extra Lemmy, Piefed, Mastodon and Peertube clients/apps, and have all the apps speak ActivityPub with the servers/instances. That’s already implemented on the server side. It’d do away with implementing any extra APIs. And make any app compatible with any Fediverse project. But we need a new ActivityPub protocol revision for that. Well-defined and with quite some extras. compared to what we have now. And everyone needs to agree on this and implement it. But in my eyes that would solve a lot of issues that are currently slowing down the Fediverse.
@threelonmusketeers @hendrik This is how many Fediverse microblogging systems currently work; they serve the Mastodon API for client to server (e.g. app to server) interactions. GoToSocial doesn’t even provide any user interface; you use it from some app originally designed for Mastodon. Why? I think because Mastodon’s HTTP API is simpler, better documented and well-tested compared to something like ActivityPub’s Client-To-Server API.
I think they’re responding to a transphobic comment and not being transphobic themselves. I think they’re addressing a far left, socially conservative conspiracy of saying “trans people r bourgeoisie inventions for culture wars to distract the public from the class war”. This person is saying that this is a far fetched idea.
I’m correct in understanding this, right?
Gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. You are not understanding right.
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Oof. Tankies rlly r weird, huh
Still not clear on what’s so trans phobic here (having read the context, which is a private message TBC).
It seems like they’re saying that major coordinated transphobic misinformation from the bourgeoisie is unlikely given that there’s also clear pro-trans activity. Whixh is superficial IMO as such doesn’t discount multiple activities but it certainly isn’t defunct logic I’d say, where there are clearly transphobes and plenty of transphobic energy in mainstream culture at the moment.
But I don’t think they’re saying transphobia isn’t a problem. The first rule of the instance they admin is against transphobia, for example. It seems to me all they’re saying is that it isn’t a major mission by the bourgeoisie. Which compared to making corporations and capitalism happy is maybe not unfair.
That’s not the situation at all.
You cloud give mbin a try its developers are nice people :) Although there is only one app for it (interstellar)
When you guys implement https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/486 I might switch.
I’m not the biggest fan the Mbin interface (that’s mostly a taste issue, nothing wrong with it per se), but that feature could be enough for me to give it another try
Give it a thumbs up so we know what to prioritize 😊
I’ve been focusing on the backend and federation stuff. But I promise that we will implement it this year :)
Great, I just did!
I have asked before and I am curious. I do not mean this to crap on people who want an app but I wonder why an app is a desired thing. I use Mbin and Lemmy on mobile completely through my browser and I’m having a good time with both.
Different strokes for different folks
I understand that. I want to know specifically what attracts these people with different tastes to an app, and what makes them not want to use it in the browser. I generally don’t judge on taste but I do get curious about why peoples’ tastes are what they are.
I always have the same thoughts when people say they use browsers. Apps are (in my experience) much more practical to use. Also, I think browsers are an ok option on a computer, but not mobile.
In my experience Reddit had to be used with an app if not on desktop, but the Fediverse on mobile feels like the Reddit app (I’m one of the few people who never had trouble with the official app, it was functional for me, so this is not meant as an insult at all. I left and came here over the API stuff only) so I have no need to switch. Much more mobile-friendly. Using the Fediverse on desktop feels a lot like the mobile experience but wider.
Ok, let’s talk about Lemmy specifically. The app I’m currently using (Connect) has so many great features like swipe gestures that improve browsing tremendously. Just in this thread, there was a link that I had to use the browser to view that had two images that I needed to zoom in to view and then zoom out to read the other comments. This is something you don’t deal with when using an app because it’s usually optimized for easier viewing.
But at the end of the day, this is about habits and what you feel most comfortable with.
Have you ever tried an app and thought, nah I don’t like it?
It’s happened before in general, though I cannot remember specific instances. As for Fediverse apps, I do have one for Matrix because I think you actually cannot use that on mobile without an app. Every time I try to open a Matrix link on mobile it tells me to pick an app. For Mbin and Lemmy, I do not need an app because I’m already having a good experience on the browser. Little to no friction or complaints. I also don’t feel I need anything more, so I don’t want to sink that minimal effort into finding and trying an app. The post that came out talking about a lot of apps not displaying Markdown correctly further discourages me, as I don’t want to track it down to find which ones do, and one of the things few apps show correctly is spoiler formatting which I use.
I see it can be about accessibility and solving usability issues on the browser now, which of course will be different for different people. Thanks for discussing with me :)
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I was probably the most prominent person who runs both and had database issues with k/mbin. I am happy to say that those are well behind me, largely because of the skill and patience of the Mbin team helping me resolve them.
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Mbin performs quite well. I just applied the most recent update which removed mercure and it’s very fast now.
Nice
Do you have downvotes disabled?
Nope. That is not yet possible on mbin. Dislikes are received but not sended. I was holding back on implementing sending dislikes because that can’t be configured yet.
If there are instances with downvoted disabled in the future, I’ll consider switching.
I find people are way too easy to downvote on lemmy so I think it’s nice to be on an instance where it is disabled.
It is in the works :)
@FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone It’s already a feature request on GitHub, you can put thumbs up under it here
https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/482
@xnx@slrpnk.net @BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de
Not sent to other instances? I am on Mbin and see downvotes.
Yes you see the down votes from othwr instances, but these other instances cannot see your downvotes
Thank you for explaining!
Sure thing 😇
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Yeah, this is just manufactured drama. The screenshots showing what preceded his comment show the whole thing to clearly be bait for the purpose of creating drama.
Bullshit. BULLSHIT. The context is “hey this tool helps keep trans people safe, any chance we can integrate it or make the platform work with it?” And the response was that its made up. Fucking. That’s not baiting. That’s a feature request
I’m wondering if the people upvoting Anon have actually seen the context. There was no baiting involved. Only an explanation on why the feature was wanted.
This is very disappointing. I’m glad lemmy is federated and open source, so that I don’t have to endorse or support every single view of the creator to use it.
Nutomic’s view is very misguided. The section of the bourgeouisie that expresses support for trans people often do so out of opportunism (though some probably genuinely support it They’re human after all). The fact that transphobia is still rampant should be proof of the lack of an “agenda”. And what is this agenda about anyways? Acceptance? Or are people really still thinking that there’s a push to turn cis people trans the same way we have done the reverse since forever?
I thought you mistyped PixelFed lol. Good to see there’s another Lemmy clone like sublinks.
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He receives thousands of dollars in donations to make the software. I’d rathe people start supporting software developers made by non bigots
Happy with my current instance, but the urge to try out PieFed grows… would probably mean abandoning Mbin though and Mbin is already so tiny compared to Lemmy…
Aren’t the communities more important than the platform, as you can access the communities whatever platform you use?
My concern is because regardless of what communities I can access, Mbin is so tiny compared to Lemmy that I feel a bit bad abandoning the less-used Fediverse platform. One less not-Lemmy user, even if I still prop up the same communities with my activities. Well, I’d still be a not-Lemmy user, but I guess one less Mbin user, which I feel could use all the help it can get.
I see what you mean.
I would happily jump from Lemmy to Mbin or Piefed, but I’m missing one key feature that I rely on to browse: “New comments” filter.
This thread has allowed me to ask about those on both sides, so hopefully it will come!
I think this could and should be true. But enough people scroll All that a more community focused dynamic does get dissolved. At least so I fear.
That being said, I feel like all threadiverse platforms could go further in enabling communities to be more well defined spaces.
The private and local only communities features coming from lemmy go toward that I think. But other things like multi communities, wikis, chat, more specific reminders and perhaps visibility options for each post could help too.
The bourgeoisie would only care about profits and maintaining their power, right? They’d be both pro-lgbtqia+ and anti-lgbtqia+ if it gets them profit and/or pushes attention away from their misuse of power.
Like selling Che Geuvara T-shirts, while running propaganda against him.Or are they seeing transphobia as mainly a reaction of religion/conservativeness? Even then a part of the bourgeoisie would try to profit off them, right?
Or did they respond as such because they saw the bait-y bourgeoisie remark(there are screenshots of the convo in the comments there)?
Would be good to see their response other than a screenshot of one reply in their private message convo.
Yea I think this is the context of their comment. Compared to buttressing capitalism, being pro or against trans people is neither here nor there as far as major coordinated missions from the bourgeoisie (or mainstream or whatever).
That they seem to think the boxer in question was biological make is likely off/inaccurate AFAICT, but that’s a moving story and not following it closely is no major issue I’d say.
Some insensitive or inappropriate language is going on here maybe. But I wouldn’t know and would want to defer to trans people to guide any understanding.
Woww wtf!!
