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.
Which is a valid viewpoint, obviously.
However, dogwhistles are a difficult thing to moderate. You first have to be aware that they exist (they are), then you have to be aware that a specific phrase is one (they do now), you’d have to verify that the report is one (still up in the air), and then decide what to do about it (still in the air).
Moderation does not have to be instant. Even if you have dozens of moderators or admins, expecting action even within an hour isn’t something to reasonably expect. Now, I haven’t gone back through and checked to see what they’ve decided at this point, if anything, but you and I are still talking about the principle itself, so I don’t know if that matters for this part of this particular discussion. As in, was the delay at the time of the post reasonable.
I agree with you that a comment using that dogwhistle needs to be removed. I agree that if it isn’t, then there’s a problem. The only point I see that we don’t agree on so far is how quickly an admin is expected to step in on a moderation case.
By this point, I would expect at least an update on the matter, some kind of “this is where we are in the process”. But, at the time of the post and the start of this particular conversation, I believe that they were still well within the range of an acceptable time frame for a policy decision on an unfamiliar dogwhistle.
Again, I’m still talking about events as of the time we started this chain. If you want to shift to what would be an acceptable state now we can, but I’ll need to go through both of the posts I’m aware of and update.
Agreed
They were informed, yes. Whether they knew before or not isn’t known, but also irrelevant at this point.
Negative. They are aware the phrase is a dogwhistle. The user realizing that or not is no longer relevant. Remove and notify of the reason.
Adhere to rule 1 of their instance.
When the admin is on, available, responds, then stops responding but continues to make comments/posts… Question answered. They decided against moderating.
I don’t believe anyone said anything about “instant”. What was said was they went unresponsive.
It IS a dogwhistle.
Whether a user realizes that or not is irrelevant to moderation.
Not remotely relevant at this point.
Not “We’re figuring it out”, just… Radio silence.
No, sorry, not relevant at all.
Not without saying as much. And that has nothing to do with their reasoning - they agree its a dog whistle.