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.
Defederation isn’t the tool for this. It’s a low level tool to prevent bad instances, like spam or illegal content, from infecting the rest of the network.
Admins and moderators already have the tools they need to moderate their communities. Instance members who want to stay inside the bubble of increased moderation also have that choice, if a Blahj user clicks ‘Local’ then they will only see communities that are completely under the control and moderation of their local admins. If a user, like the one in the OP, behaves badly then their ban will remove them.
It isn’t the role of an instance admin to moderate all of federated social media. A user can block a community or instance on their own. They do not require an admin to do that for them.
Federation isn’t a moderation tool.
You don’t consider bigotry to be worthy of defederation?
Or is it that you don’t consider dogwhistles a form of bigotry?
Because that’s what Ada was coming to .uk admins about. And, it’s what they say they’re working on a decision about.
I would say it is absolutely the role of every admin to actively moderate bigotry, period. Now, while I definitely consider dogwhistles just as actionable as direct slurs and hate speech, I can’t really expect everyone to agree, but that’s what the issue is about, it isn’t some random thing like discussing football rules. It goes right to the heat of a major social issue.
I would say that issues of bigotry are more important, and more admin attention worthy than spam, since spam is only going to hurt the instances in any realistic scenario. Dogwhistles hurt people, in the real world.
Like, if it’s your opinion that that’s not the case, that’s whatever, but I hope you understand that it is an issue that is a “low level” problem to a lot of people.
For fuck sake, even assuming it was a bigotry or dog whistling (and admins clearly disagreed with Ada on that), it was ONE user. ONE. Defederating over this is 100% her right but remains a huge overreaction.