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.
That stood out to me too. A ton of people jumped in with instantly inflammatory takes which seem almost tailor-made to continue this ridiculous dispute.
It’s not just here in this community, it’s throughout the all page. The fediverse is worrying some people and it’s showing.
Man, this is the same spirit of the shit that we perennially went through with forums in the old bbcode days. Established users, especially mods or admins, playing dumb clique games with a community because they all get dopamine from it.
I’m sure the Fediverse does worry some, but this is likely not much influenced by that. It’s just regular, shitty human nature on the internet.
You’re talking to a veteran politics user from the bad place. I love that you’re calling your behavior as being “just regular, shitty human nature” as a defense.
What?
Bruh they’re a troll, ignore them.
I think it is both. It’s very subtle, but there’s enough of distinct little overlap between accounts that support super-odd political views, and accounts that like to attack specific people and cause random drama, that I found it really interesting.
And yes, also, people are jerks sometimes when you give them power and anonymity and a social grouping that is unmoored from everything except the dots on screen and the imaginings in their heads.
I actually have a pretty high opinion of PugJesus otherwise…
I do too. He’s not wrong here. I just think it’s not productive to have extensive bitter arguments about it. I think it’s a selected group of users starting all the drama (I have no idea if because they are trolls or if because they are drama-loving people who like being able to sling around “transphobia!” because it makes them feel like they’re being good allies). Whatever it is, those people are having some level of success in restarting the drama here in these comments. I think continuing the drama in this fashion is playing precisely into their hands, so I support the proposal to ban talking about it here. But he’s not wrong.
Alternative perspective: the drama has been restarted because of PJ’s post, and what seems to be an alt by a person aware of the !196 debacle created to stir that drama
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39114269/17051352
Well, but he made a specific post about a specific mod action that was, in fact, real messed up. That to me is legit even if I think there are better ways of addressing it in this case.
The drama I am talking about is an army of people coming in to screech that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is horrible and bad and transphobic and fascist. I think PJ has a pretty valid point that acceding to that screeching, because it “will cause drama,” is basically ceding control of the space to whoever feels like using the threat of screeching if they don’t get their way.
hey props, this changed my view! i’ll go back and edit my comments. you are right. this should continue to be allowed here as far as the mods feel is possible to keep moderated. you’re right. it’s better for both spaces for all the screeching to be left here because it keeps it away from the trans space.
What caused my post, I wonder? It must have been nothing. Maybe the wind.
My opinions on xenogender aside, the fact that Blahaj defenders, in this very comm, harassed a trans user into leaving the Fediverse has me fuming, and rightfully so in my opinion. And they play it off as “[The harassed user] deserved it.” even now. That is pretty core to the anger I feel right now.
Did they know about the idea of different instances, and each one having their own set of rules and missions?
I was going to ask whether you meant the harassers or the harassed, but I think the answer is yes in both cases.
And they still left the fediverse?
Considering they were attacked on an instance entirely different from the one they thought they were ‘away’ from, by that instance’s defenders?
It’s hard to blame them.
That’s really unfortunate. Does the platform they’re on not have the “block instance/domain” feature?
Blocking an instance only blocks the communities of that instance. It doesn’t block users of that instance showing up in communities on other instances
Blocking an instance doesn’t keep the users of that instance from brigading other instances.
Sadly, the feature doesn’t block users, who are the ones who were causing the trouble. So far as I know, the block function only blocks communities/subs. Furthermore, the Blahaj defenders largely were not using their Blahaj accounts. Most people on the Fediverse have one or more alts.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. I read back on it a little bit, and it’s some grade-A bullshit. I’m just not sure if it’s the type of thing that can get solved with griping about the moderation. I think in my mind, the users who were egging on the harassment of that person are different from the moderators who were applying the policy.
I think a lot of the root source of it has to do with the power of words and mental structures. Once any type of disagreement with the official stance is “transphobia,” you’ll get genuinely good people who are for-real convinced that anyone who’s trying to talk sense into them is being transphobic and denying their right to exist, and they’ll get all amped up to fight against that person. If they don’t do that, they’re being a bad member of the community. It’ll tear a big rift in the communication between people. I have some experience with having that kind of structure in your brain and having it distort how you look at things and how you react to things, and it makes it really hard for people to make sense of each other.
I absolutely agree that DraconicNEO harassed the shit out of an actual trans person with some perfectly valid things to say, and is consistently saying “transphobia” is anything they don’t agree with and attacking it using some carefully chosen trigger-words. They’re also coming into these comments to try their absolute best to restart the argument. None of that is a very LGBTQ-friendly thing to do or a good thing for cooperation between instances. I’m just saying I’m not sure the anger needs to be directed at the moderators here. I think trying to strive for an actually inclusive social contract, where people can be okay with each other, is the goal, and that has to start with the ways people interact with each other separate from when banhammers come into the picture. In this case. Does that make sense? Have I missed some case of the blahaj admins doing that type of harassment or anything? I get that the policy seems over-the-top but I’m not aware of them actually being obnoxious about it, they’re just very consistent about applying it. I sort of get why it’s that way, even though I disagree with the decision. I just don’t think they are where the toxicity is coming from, here.
I suppose since the bans started with Draconic Neo calling down Ada, and then Ada finding that a valid reason for a ban, not just for me, but later, separately, without being called in, also for the trans user in question, that I see it in a very “unstated approval” light. I am also very pissed about the harassment situation, though, so I may be making connections with tunnel vision.
Yeah, I think Ada’s just applying the rules. That’s fair (or… well, it makes sense why she’s doing it I mean.) Like I say, I think the goal should be building a social contract where harassing a user in that fashion is going to be seen as “holy shit what’s wrong with that person” as opposed to something normal. Right now, it’s normal for some weird reason. But I think that’s a separate thing, only tangentially related to the moderation. It just happens that that person is also able to abuse the rules to involve moderators against people who they’re having that type of disagreement with.
Would the harassment-victim have stuck around, if not for the moderation? I don’t know. Maybe so. But I don’t think the moderation is the issue.
Like I said, I see a very “Wink wink” attitude of permissiveness in this, especially considering the second ban was not from Ada being tagged.
Going back to the old forum days comparison, upsetting one of the big users would always get you swarmed, even if the big user didn’t deign to publicly involve themselves.
That kind of community culture is cultivated.
Yeah, but this type of post is community cultivation, too. It’s defining a whole instance as “the enemy” to some group of people, to some extent, and then for people on that instance, it’s defining whole groups of people on “the other side” of the argument as transphobic fascists who don’t want to respect people’s gender pronouns.
Like I say, you’re not wrong. I think a lot of it roots back, too, to mods just not having time to make these Wisdom-of-Solomon decisions about every single interpersonal spat that develops that involves their instance in some way. Maybe Ada should have looked over the conversation with RatInAHat and gotten back to the reporter and said, “You know what? That’s clearly not transphobia. I get what you mean but I’m not going to take any action here. Please chill out and stop harassing that person.” Maybe she should be carefully weighing whether Dragonfucker really needs their pronouns respected, whether someone who doesn’t is really going to impact the community negatively in any way. But then, some exceptions having been carved out, now she’s suddenly in charge of making all these little corner-case judgement calls for everybody’s little issues. And now some fraction of the community is yelling at her because in their mind she’s betrayed them. And, of course, even if she does it perfectly, the trolls will find some new weird little edge case to test the boundaries with, always with a bunch of accounts (some of which are perfectly real people who are just impassioned about the issue for one reason or another) yelling all the time about how she’s doing terrible and they need to quit and find a new server. It’s too much. It’s just nonstop.
I have no idea what the real solution is. I do think having a social contract in place where something like DraconicNEO’s combative posts to RatInAHat would be seen as wild and unreasonable by everyone involved would be a good start. I think a lot of it starts with defining good behavior in terms of, well, good behavior, instead of in terms of “I belong to the right grouping so shut up and do what I say.” But it’s just tough to develop that on Lemmy, honestly. The modern internet, Lemmy included, has adopted some traditional features that are almost tailor-made for producing toxic interactions. I think the only reason why everything isn’t like this, is that the vast majority of people really aren’t cockheads, and mostly just want to talk about anime or whatever and mostly be nice to each other.