Hi everyone,
I’ve been thinking over how to address large amounts of outside engagement disrupting the safety of our community. As Lemmy is a large space that extends well beyond the borders of our community, when posts hit front page we often start getting a lot of engagement on posts by people outside of the transfeminine experience. Often well-meaning people engage here and say things that are insensitive, require OP to further explain themselves and their experiences unrelated to the topic of the post, or disrupt the safety of the space for transfeminine people.
This is a problem that I’m taking seriously. The purpose of this community as I see it is and has always been to provide a safe supportive community to transfeminine people. So with that in mind posters are now allowed to request engagement from specific groups on their post. This can be gender diverse people, trans people with unsupportive parents, trans parents, people who have struggled with addictions, trans people of color, etc.
I’ve seen a few people make comments on engagement issues lately and so I’ve decided that this course of action makes the most sense to preserve the safety of the community while still allowing engagement from other people when that engagement is wanted.
How you choose to make this clear is for the moment up to you. You can add a tag in your title, state so explicitly in your title, or write it somewhere in your post (try and do so clearly as I might not have the chance to fully read your post in time).
Moderator action may be taken per your request. I’m choosing to keep a steady eye on how this affects the community and to ensure that it isn’t being weaponized against marginalized people within our community. I ask that everyone is patient and expect some adjustment to this new rule. A certain amount of discretion will also be applied on a per incident basis, this is not a rule banning all non-transfems from the community just providing posters a choice with regards to engagement.
This new change has been added to the sidebar and is considered effective immediately.
Feedback on this change would be great. If you think some aspect of this should be changed or you have concerns please let us know.
I do understand why this decision was taken, but I think this could become very messy without some explicit method of requesting (or rejecting) engagement. Lemmy is a very big place, and its unlikely even the most well-meaning individuals will check the sidebar for every single community they enter when they only want to contribute to a post. This is just exacerbated by the subjective, loosely defined requests for engagement as the system stands.
Even aside from outside users, I can imagine it creating issues when moderation is enforced. We’ve already had enough drama around this instance regarding the way we protect our users and defend our right to exist, the best thing we can do moving forward is make such protections as clear, unambiguous, and explicit as possible. For the safety of our transfem girlies and the health of our community discussions.
I would definitely vote for a set of community agreed tags in post titles to state engagement preferences, where any post without a tag should be assumed to encourage engagement from any reader.
I agree, and think what you’re proposing is worthwhile in standardizing how such requests are made. Having title tags was what I initially thought of as well. There are some considerations, like the fact that engagement requests are kinda open ended. As of now, we don’t have a set list of permissible engagement groups in mind. But even just adding a tag to post title with the engagement request may work out, with the closed square brackets format.
Also totally get what you mean about blahaj routinely levying criticism for how the admins protect the interests of the users here, and I anticipated this implementation might draw some of that criticism.
I’m not sure I understand your angle here. Drama around blahaj protecting trans people is not on us, but on the people that are ignorant on the need for such protection. I see a lot of ignorant, sometimes mildly transphobic comments from other instances that flood any trans points of view here and I think that our top priority should be to prevent that and create a real safe space, not to cater to those instances where those comments stem from. I think any action to make this space more exclusive to trans(questioning) people is a good move. And I honestly don’t care if some ignorant people start creating drama around it.
I’m not sure if this change is a real solution though (it would require very proactive moderation) but it’s worth a try. Imo the best solution is to defederate from huge offender instances (.world for example)
From the admin perspective, defederating is challenging on lemmy, because instances can hold communities with different rules and audiences. .world for example is the largest source of blahaj users subscriptions because there are many communities over there that offer value for the blahaj community members.
The broad rule of thumb I use is that I will ban transphobic users or communities in a heart beat, wherever they’re based.
I won’t defederate from entire instances though unless the admins of that instance are actively transphobic or otherwise bigoted. As long as they act on egregious transphobia (which the lemmy.world admins do), then defederation isn’t on the cards
Me and Ada are both very active in this space. I check this community throughout my day every day and try my best to stay on top of moderation issues. We’ll never be able to pre-empt all violations of post engagement requests, but I think a good number of people will respect the requests without need for moderation. Where and when disrespect for post engagement requests appears, we will remove comments accordingly.
I’ve observed many cis people engaging here in ways that haven’t been nominally rule breaking but that I could also tell were making posters uncomfortable or feeling disengaged from their own posts. Up till now, I have given a fair amount of leeway to commenters I think are engaging in good faith. The implementation of this new rule expands on my ability to limit such comments. It’s small, but I’ve also reworded a section of the sidebar to less ambiguously reflect my intentions with this most recent change.
So, yeah, I guess we’ll see how these new changes are in practice and whether or not Ada and I are able to handle the additional workload and mod response time frames. I don’t see it being a problem, but if it did become one, I’d be open to considering an additional moderator.
As for defederation, that’s, of course, beyond the scope of what i can implement with regards to this community. I don’t think this is being considered at the moment, but I wouldn’t know either way. Might be worth mentioning on blahaj meta?
I honestly appreciate the effort, and I hope that it does indeed help. It’s reassuring to know that you guys are trying to solve the problem.