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.
PTB
Blahj is a problem instance.
The important distinction here is that they’re not simply trying to moderate their communities. They’re free to moderate their communities for their users. They want to push their rules on other instances.
They’re not free to dictate to the greater social media space the acceptable policies on discourse. Their admins are constantly trying to enforce their ban lists on other servers and communities (or else, you see what happened to feddit.uk).
To see this, go make a new account and get banned from Blahj (you don’t even have to post in their communities, see my PTB post as an example) and you’ll see that 40+ other completely unrelated communities will also automatically ban you. This is the result of their backroom bullying and toxic behavior towards other admins/mods.
It’s easier for an admin or moderator to simply accept their bans than to deal with admins who will take extreme measures, like defederate your entire instance (and lobby others to defederate you) if you don’t accept their dictates.
If their goal is to create an instance with communities for trans people then banning users from their communities would serve their goals.
But, that isn’t what they’re trying to do. This isn’t about creating a safe space, they have all of the tools that they need to make Blahj safe. Blahj users in Blahj communities could have been protected from this problem user by the user being banned.
There’s no need to contact the admins of other instances to ban a user from your instance or from your communities. Trying to bully other instances or communities isn’t required and it is incredibly toxic. Even the moderator here, in this community, has received pressure from Blahj admins about suppressing topics related to Blahj.
To be honest we were just getting sick of all the posts complaining about Blajah’s policy of banning folks who they consider to be transphobic from their instance. No pressure was applied from Blajah, we just felt it was the right thing to do. Your whole narrative is bullshit tbh.
In reality, the fediverse is (mostly) quite left wing compared to most other social media spaces, so obviously the majority of instances are gonna be supportive of Blajah’s attempt to create a safe space for those folks who need or want that. While we don’t run dbzer0 as a safe space, I think it’s great that those spaces exist. And they only exist at all because Ada and her team go to a lot of effort to keep it that way.
And by way of comparison, we recently had a vote in our governance community about defederating from another instance because their admin initially didn’t want to take action against some right wing communities, and we felt it was becoming a nazi bar situation. The whole point of having the vote was to apply pressure on the admin to deal with it. And there was a positive outcome because the admin did deal with it and so we didn’t defederate. I mean sure, the admin didn’t like being pressured, but it got the job done.
Hopefully feddit.uk will change their policy to explicitly ban anti-trans dogwhistles, and the fediverse will be better for it imo. Freeze peach instances all become nazi-bars before long.
You’re running the ‘Are these people are power tripping?’ community in the Fediverse, a community of majority left wing people, and you get a lot of people posting about a single instance, so much so that it dominates the posts to the point that requires moderation intervention.
You can read that in a lot of ways.
One of the ways to read it is that the instance’s admins are power tripping. That doesn’t mean that they’re not trying to create a safe space or that there are not some transphobes. All of these things can be true at once. Some people get caught up in the righteousness of their cause and fail to consider how their actions affect others.
Hey, I’m a dbzer0 member (I even contribute financially to keep it running) and I’m one of the people who complained about how salty suckers like you come in all the goddamned time to complain about blahaj.
It’s not because Ada is doing anything wrong, it’s because enough of you don’t like what she’s doing that you whine and complain every chance you get. And you don’t even have the decency to complain about different things!
Waaaah! Ada banned me! But I feel like I wasn’t transphobic/I wasn’t on blahaj when I said that/but what about free speech/but what about my feelings?
And so it’s the same post, over and over. And the community rules the same way, over and over. Surprise! Ada made a safe space for blahaj members! They love what she’s doing and thank her for it! No one over there is sad that you’re gone! The fediverse is working as intended!
Not only that, every time one of you makes the same tired, self-centered post, it doesn’t matter if you’re downvoted to oblivion. It doesn’t matter if the community hands your ass to you. You linger. And the next prick shows up and complains. And the community gives them the finger. But the first asshole is here still, and he tells the second asshole that they’re right! And Ada is a monster! And the community is wrong!
So they linger. And the next prick comes along. And the community tells them to fuck right off. But now two assholes tell them that the community is wrong. Ada is a power tripper. Free speech. You weren’t actually transphobic. You’re right. Everyone else is wrong.
And now, in this very thread, we have like five assholes who all made posts to YPTB, complaining about Ada. And you’re finding each other and you’re turning our community into enough assholes that you’ll eventually have enough to turn every. Goddamn. Post. Into your little butt-hurt pow-wow.
So not only are you posting the same tired bullshit over and over and over, even though the community has made it clear what they think- you’re also using these posts to build a shitbird coalition. So. Why the ruck would anyone intentionally allow that to continue? These “Ada was mean to me” posts add nothing of value, and they empower a removed element.
Ada and I have never exchanged words (that I remember, fediverse is a big place) and zero blahaj members have ever asked me to complain about people constantly having the same goddamn problem with blahaj. So let me just nip this in the bud right now- dbzer0 is a self-governing instance, and if enough of us think you’re being a whiny removed, no one has to come and try to dictate what is and isn’t allowed in our community.
TL;DR I know you feel empowered with your handful of transphobic asshole friends here to upvote you and back you up, but you have been told, over and over, that Ada isn’t doing anything wrong. And when dbzer0 community members like me complained that the blahaj posts were the same fucking post over and over, our team fixed it. I get that you don’t like that, but this is the fediverse. Make your own instance to removed about Ada and kindly fuck off.
Banning people who were never active on your instance and applying pressure on other instances to ban users is nothing wrong?
I am all for trans rights (see my recent post about nonsensical UK supreme Court judgement) and this is not the way to support these.
You keep saying it over and over but the downvotes and the vast majority of replies every single time you complain disagree.
Remind me, how did that post of yours here go? Was it… -18? Were the comments overwhelmingly telling you to stuff it? Sure seems that way.
And yet all you do is continue to say the same garbage over and over. You’re allowed to say that this isn’t how you support trans people. But the people of blahaj disagree. You can complain that this is power tripping. But the people of YPTB disagree. You can whine that legitimate complaints are being silenced on YPTB. But the people of dbzer0 disagree. Which is why we asked to put a stop to the “waaa I was banned by Ada” posts.
That’s not true. The first post by HAL-5700X is at +29 / - 56, so about a third agree.
Kolanaki’s following statement:
is at +33 / -29 and that’s without the text that prompted the defederation being revealed in this thread.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/36737764/18213591
If the text was available, chances are the reaction might have been very different.
Even FauxLiving’s posts stating the following (exert, not the full post) is at +18 / - 30.
A large minority of YPTB aren’t aligned with your opinion.
🔥
Also, just want to mark it down that we can still rely on up vote down vote numbers. Enjoy it while it lasts once threat actors arrive, it is gonna be reddit astroturf
Not sure what you are referring to.
I am pointing out that there is a decent amount of pushback, but in voting and comments. The framing that the whole (or even an overwhelming majority) of YPTB is aligned with a single view is factually incorrect.
True, but context and content matters, and when the posters are all deemed YDI then we start to look like the place people come to whinge when their actions have consequences.
Seems to me that’s exactly what you are doing right now.
Possibly, but I’m just a user so my failings only affect me, and not the greater social media community.
They wouldn’t understand. Jpeg
Look at this guygal with nuanced takes
JFC… Ban him, he is dangerous!!!
Reported for abuse, shit lord.
Yeah, I’m sure the irony police are on their way.
It is content censorship… No feddit.UK rules were broken is my understanding
They proceeded to have a melt down over another admin not doing as they got told…
Enough with this shite, these people are not mature enough to be federated to gen pop
Yes, exactly, it’s censoring transphobic content. That’s the whole point.
Removed by mod
… what
What I said in the above comment ;)
Exactly.
People treating this like it is justified seem to misunderstand how the federated social media space works.
If the Blahj admins felt that the user wasn’t welcome in their communities then they could ban them. That’s the end of that user.
There is zero reason to contact the admins of another instance.
The reason they’re doing this is because they want to pressure the admins to change their content moderation policy to something that the Blahj admins (I mean Ada) approve of. If the admins feel that it is too onerous to do so, well then they can just apply the Blahj supplied user ban list to automate the process.
So now if Blahj bans you, you’ll get banned by every other instance that they’ve managed to bully and cajole into their censorship network. (This is easy to see, make a new account and get banned from Blahj. Look at your modlog and you’ll see pages of other non-Blahj communities that automatically ban you within seconds).
They don’t want the ability to ban users from Blahj, they want the ability to dictate to other instances which users should be banned. It has nothing to do with creating safe communities, they have all of the tools that they need to do that.
This is the very essence of power tripping.
I couldn’t have said better
Spot on.
All social media has these clowns but at least on fedi we can see them operate in the open. It turns out there is a lot more common sense out there if it ain’t getting its accounts banned all the time like on corpo socials.
To a certain extent similar instances with similar rules should share bans. It makes no sense for them to individually ban the same user for the same reason as they trudge through communities.
It is absolutely worth talking to admins on different instances to see what their rules are to deffedirate from any instance that is bound to be the nazi bar. With ought talking to the admins they have no idea if content is allowed or just hasn’t been removed yet.
The idea that they are a big powerful bully group is insane. Other instance admins can simply ignore them and suffer no meaningful consequences. The worst they can do is deffedirate.
Ideally everyone would be filtered in their space on an individual basis. This however is utterly impractical and filtering out problematic instances completely makes sense. It makes no sense for volunteers to give themselves more work to allow users from instances where they don’t want to deal with say 90% of their user base
Welcome to Reddit.
The problem with sharing ban lists is that it is ripe for abuse and only multiplies the damage done to a user by a wrongful ban.
I agree that the admins and moderation teams should be in contact with one another (and, in my experience they are) to handle issues like spamming or connection issues. But, in the end, responsibilities and obligations are pretty clear cut: Each instance handles its own moderation. The user was not in Blahj’s communities, was not a Blahj user and so an outside moderator or Admin has zero say in how that user is handled.
An administrator can ask another administrator to do something but they are under no obligation to do so. This includes things like banning a user or changing policy.
In this case, an administrator from another instance came to Feddit.uk and asked the administrators to ban a single user. The administrators investigated and determined that the user didn’t violate their policies. The administrator wasn’t happy with this, tried to argue and was ignored, they noticed that the admins were active elsewhere. Once they thought they were being ignored then they defederated the instance.
Notice how they don’t mention any disruption to their communities on their servers, they don’t say that the Feddit.uk instance was responsible for an unusual amount of banned users or any other reason that would lead to the conclusion that they needed to defederate.
My read of it is: the admin asked for a ban, was brushed off and then they were angry at being ignored so they defederated the instance and posted a justification loaded with emotional terms and light on facts and reasons.
This is, at best, an interpersonal problem between Admins, not a moderation issue like it is being framed. So, PTB