I’m gonna get real with you folks, we’ve had way too many of these posts recently. I’ve been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldn’t care less about my gender identity. But just because that’s true for me, doesn’t make that true for everyone.
The beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t like the way a particular instance or community is moderated you can simply choose another to hang out on, or create your own.
Blajah has made it pretty clear by now they will ban anyone who argues against the validity of xenogenders, in order to create a safe space for those folks. That’s fair enough imo.
Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajah’s admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.
I can completely understand why Blajah users don’t want to have to constantly argue with external users about the validity of their chosen identities. Bans are one way Blajah has decided to manage that problem so that their users can experience lemmy in relative peace and safety. While it is a blunt tool and I have my reservations about preemptive bans, there are not many other options for @[email protected], other than defederation from most instances. That would be a terrible outcome for the fediverse as a whole.
In order to help Blajah to maintain their safe space, I would like to propose, if @[email protected] agrees and community sentiment is positive:
- that we no longer accept posts about this topic in this community; and
- we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.
That’s all folks, have at 'er.
Proposing a very specific limit on posts referring mod/admin actions taken against users on LBZ that directly fall afoul of their instance rules regarding very specific gatekeeping might have some value. The subject has been hashed and re-hashed too fucking much. Their rules are their rules, breaking those rules on the instance is clear YDI. Breaking those rules elsewhere and having action taken against you is arguably PTB. I’m in favor of the idea of putting that on wax.
Purging previous discussion is no good, and even the proposal, coming from a community mod as it does, rubs me the wrong way. It shouldn’t, because you have just as much right to propose a change as any other community member, but it puts me on edge.
There is value in what’s been said already, even if some of it is highly disagreeable. Suggesting removal of that record for any reason invites future discussion of the same, IMO. Not everyone who will ever be a member of this community is a member now. If we’re going to consider making a rule about this whole mess, best to leave the roadmap that led us here intact.
Potential yes to a well-defined rule of specific, narrow scope. Hard, hard no to retroactive application of that rule.
I just want to clarify. The only people getting banned for remote comments are people who knowingly and explicitly gatekeep other folks identity in response to this topic coming up. They are banned so that they don’t start appearing in blahaj communities with the very people they’re invalidating.
To me, there’s no difference. If someone’s response to this topic coming up is to double down on gatekeeping, it doesn’t make them any less harmful just because they did it outside of a blåhaj community.
I appreciate your willingness to respond and engage on the subject. I understand your position, and that it makes sense to you. I personally feel that there is a degree of overreach involved when action is taken based on behavior that happens outside of an instance, but I also acknowledge that defederation is a more severe version of the same action. That causes a bit of cognitive dissonance for me, which makes me wonder if I’m viewing it all wrong.
For now, I still believe that your method is beyond what I consider to be a reasonable exercise of authority. That’s not a slight on you; I have always gotten the impression that all of your actions are taken with the intent of doing what you believe is best for your instance. Our philosophies just differ somewhat when it comes to exercise of authority. I find you and db0 to be the most intellectually honest of the larger instance admins with regards to how you go about the business of adminning, for whatever that’s worth.
Thanks again for engaging, I hope everyone else sees that you do your best to be consistent to your instance values.