I’m gonna get real with you folks, we’ve had way too many of these posts recently. I’ve been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldn’t care less about my gender identity. But just because that’s true for me, doesn’t make that true for everyone.

The beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t like the way a particular instance or community is moderated you can simply choose another to hang out on, or create your own.

Blajah has made it pretty clear by now they will ban anyone who argues against the validity of xenogenders, in order to create a safe space for those folks. That’s fair enough imo.

Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajah’s admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.

I can completely understand why Blajah users don’t want to have to constantly argue with external users about the validity of their chosen identities. Bans are one way Blajah has decided to manage that problem so that their users can experience lemmy in relative peace and safety. While it is a blunt tool and I have my reservations about preemptive bans, there are not many other options for @[email protected], other than defederation from most instances. That would be a terrible outcome for the fediverse as a whole.

In order to help Blajah to maintain their safe space, I would like to propose, if @[email protected] agrees and community sentiment is positive:

  • that we no longer accept posts about this topic in this community; and
  • we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.

That’s all folks, have at 'er.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
    49·
    6 hours ago

    Now Blahaj defenders want this to not be discussed under any circumstances.

    I don’t think they’re saying you can’t discuss it, or they’re going to ban or defederate you for trying to talk about it, or anything like that. They’re just saying that, now that the issue has been discussed a bunch of times in this community with nothing getting accomplished other than a big productive-conclusion-free food fight, they’d like to (or they are proposing to) prohibit future repetitions of the exact same food fight. I think this is one of the rare times when “you can still talk about it, you just can’t do it here anymore” has a good amount of validity.

    And like I say, I think the users are much more the issue here than the moderation. I think “how do we manage to get along on the fediverse” may be a better way to approach it than “don’t you agree that the mods of blahaj are terrible.”

    Who here wants the right to go around insulting everyone without consequences?

    That’s sort of what I’m saying. A lot of people on lemmy do want to have that right, and it’s not super-important (apparently) within the consensus culture to say they’re not allowed to. The boundaries of what’s acceptable behavior are often in very weird places, to me.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      89·
      6 hours ago

      I don’t think they’re saying you can’t discuss it, or they’re going to ban or defederate you for trying to talk about it, or anything like that.

      Proposal from OP, one of the mods (who, in fairness to them, is very hard put on by all this pointless fucking drama that they get to get hit with without even being involved)

      that we no longer accept posts about this topic in this community; and

      we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.

      One of the most upvoted replies:

      I agree, this community should be a place to discuss mod abuse, not bellyache over transphobia and hate speech being censored or being banned from it. Such discourse makes this community extremely toxic and unusable to vulnerable groups, it also creates inherent bias here favoring alt-right shitheads.

      They’re just saying that, now that the issue has been discussed a bunch of times in this community with nothing getting accomplished other than a big productive-conclusion-free food fight, they’d like to (or they are proposing to) prohibit future repetitions of the exact same food fight.

      The reason why it is production-free is because Blahaj defenders swarm the comm every time it happens. If the position is “Users are sabotaging discussions they don’t want to happen, so we should just not have those discussions”, then all you’ve done is reward toxic behavior.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
        53·
        5 hours ago

        (who, in fairness to them, is very hard put on by all this pointless fucking drama that they get to get hit with without even being involved)

        Yeah that’s part of my POV lol.

        we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.

        Yeah, deleting past posts is silly I think. I don’t agree with that part.

        I agree, this community should be a place to discuss mod abuse, not bellyache over transphobia and hate speech being censored or being banned from it. Such discourse makes this community extremely toxic and unusable to vulnerable groups, it also creates inherent bias here favoring alt-right shitheads.

        Yeah, that’s a bunch of bullshit. The only reason I didn’t get in an argument with that person is (1) life is short (2) like I was saying, there are clearly a bunch of good-faith people who are sort of twisted up with certain words and definitions, such that they’ll interpret anyone trying to disagree with that person as transphobia. That’s the whole point of them being so forceful about defining anyone disagreeing with them in a very particular way. It lays the groundwork for anyone who’s an “ally” to misinterpret any disagreement.

        I think the solution to that has to come in some other form than just having a big sprawling slapfight with them. The chance of them seeing reason about it seems near 0, and I think the sum total impact of the slapfight on other people who are observing it will just be to drive them a little further into their echo-chamber.

        The reason why it is production-free is because Blahaj defenders swarm the comm every time it happens. If the position is “Users are sabotaging discussions they don’t want to happen, so we should just not have those discussions”, then all you’ve done is reward toxic behavior.

        Correct. I’m not saying it’s not a problem. I’m saying that having big frequent slapfights about it will not solve the problem (and yes, partly specifically because at this point there’s a whole crew of users who’ve I guess been amped-up and trained to come in and vigorously inflame the slapfight any time one happens.) The best I can come up with is:

        1. Having a more serious conversation about what type of culture we want to establish here, without coming out of the gate and announcing, effectively, that anyone who’s a supporter of one particular instance is “bad.”
        2. Changing the tradition of moderation so that there’s not an expectation of someone standing over the comments needing to delete anything that is “bad” before someone sees it, and has a total meltdown and can’t get out of bed for the rest of the day.

        Neither of those are simple things to do. I’m just saying that that type of conversation seems more likely to lead to a good solution to the badness that you’re seeing, than is just vocally hassling the blahaj admins and users every time this same issue comes up.

      • MBM@lemmings.world
        33·
        4 hours ago

        Blahaj defenders swarm the comm every time it happens

        Banned users like yourself also flood the thread every time. I don’t see how that’s any different.

        • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          3 hours ago

          Banned users like yourself also flood the thread every time. I don’t see how that’s any different.

          What, all three of us? Clearly we’re mass downvoting Blahaj defenders and mass-upvoting our Banned Comrades™. Hell, I was only added to that banned list the other day.