Update: In light of the programming.dev update here https://programming.dev/post/8399272, the defederation is no longer going ahead.
However, something more needs to be said. Even here on Blahaj, some of our users took issue with the choice to defederate over this issue.
So I would like to give some background and context.
Blahaj Zone exists, because both Kaity and I left mainstream social media to escape transphobia. Reddit, with its lackluster approach to fighting transphobia, and twitter, with its outright celebration of transphobia pushed us here, to the fediverse, and to create Blahaj Zone and Blahaj Lemmy.
To that end, we will continue to treat transphobia seriously. Our goal is to create a space where gender diverse folk can exist and let our defenses down a little, where we don’t have to worry about getting dragged in to an argument with a transphobe, or a bad faith actor “just asking questions”.
If you are looking for a more reddit like experience, where in the interest of increased engagement, we let low level transphobia slide, and push responsibility for dealing with it on to community mods and individual users, then you will likely not be happy with blahaj going forward. If you choose to stay here, understand that we may defederate again in the future over similar issues.
The choice is yours.
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It has recently been brought to my attention that the lead admin of programming.dev is engaging in ongoing transphobia.
You can see the conversation in question here https://programming.dev/comment/6131539
For that reason we will be defederating from programming.dev in 48 hours.
There are only three communities on that instance used by small number of our users, so this won’t have a big impact, but if you are one of those users, you will need to use an alt account on another instance if you wish to access the communities.
I might be missing something, but I believe an admin being potentially transphobic only matters if they do not moderate transphobic content that leaks out to other instances. I don’t think I’ve seen transphobic content leak out of programming.dev.
That said, I’ve read some of Adas comments on the intention behind defederation, and blahaj. What I’ve learned is that Blahaj wans set up as a safe space, so 0 tolerance is understandable, and is well within their rights to establish and enforce.
Coming from someone who is just looking to Lemmy as a reddit alternative, it’s simultaneously cool that communities can do this, and a little unfortunate that with Lemmy being as small as it is (compared to reddit), we are defederating over single comment threads. Again, blahaj was intended to be a safe space and has no obligation to be a part of the “reddit replacement” I’m looking for, so if they deem it necessary then good on them.
Agreed. I hope our two instances can find a way to stay federated but I hold no anger if we can’t.