That post explicitly says it’s not a place for debate or participation from users of other instances.
I’d like to respect that but I think events like this need debate and discussion because it helps to develop and evolve the culture of lemmy and the fediverse in general.
The post says:
This post is “FYI only” for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the “adult human female” dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and “civil disagreement” on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
I find it absolutely crazy that they de-federated over 1 user, when a block would suffice.
I don’t agree with transphobia (of course), but Blåhaj can’t demand that their rules be enforced in other instances.
They can, or choose not to interoperate with servers that don’t have their best interests at heart. That’s the whole point of defederation and people honestly need to understand that. I know in the beginning the Fediverse propaganda painted this place as a free speech safe-haven. That is a lie, this place has rules and servers expect you to follow them. They aren’t obligated to tolerate bullshit. Blahaj.zone isn’t obligated to tolerate or listen to transphobia.
Also one important fact here is that feddit.uk themselves has rules against transphobia. It’s not even about following blahaj’s rules, it’s about them not following their own rules now.
I think this take is a bit disingenuous. From what I can tell, LBZ defederated because the admins ignored requests from ada to reign in transphobia/clarify rules around dealing with transphobic comments or posts.
Defederation is the opposite of enforcing one instance’s rules on another instance. Both sets of instance rules are still intact. LBZ has chosen to stop federation because of their own instance rules. If changes are made and the instance rules and enforcement no longer break LBZ’s instance rules, I’m willing to bet ada and LBZ would be open to federate again.
Extremely disingenuous given the whole chain failed for an instance serving a geographic zone literally nicknamed “TERF island” that recently made an extremely transphobic ruling in parliament
Context reaaaaaaaaally fuckin’ matters
They can and they did.
I think most instances have a baseline of what is not acceptable, even on other instances. This is one of those baseline rules.