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.
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