As posted about recently in [email protected] and [email protected] it seems that @[email protected]’s stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don’t think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it’s open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it’s very likely they won’t have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can’t speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn’t inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven’t seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don’t want to see that, don’t open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I’d really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj’s local community on this, I’m not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren’t from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
yea let’s defederate.
somthin somthin terf-tankie-whatevr… somthin along those lines… i dun evn kno whad those words mean
- TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (transphobia)
- Tankie = Apologists for outright oppressive, murderous regimes like Putin’s Russia and North Korea
seen a couple of TERFs get bullied off of my fedi TLs lately and it warms my heart
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defederating from instances you don’t like
And that’s where you lost me since I made this post highlighting a problem with management of the server expressing harmful transphobic sentiment and now you are trying to make it out like these are petty personal opinions.
We’ve defederated from servers which allow or don’t care about transphobia already, feddit.uk is an existing example. The fact that you are dismissing the problem like this shows you don’t understand why we have such hostility towards transphobic sentiment or just don’t care.
If there is content on defederated instances users want access to they can make accounts on other servers.
Not to automatically assume that these users want to see hateful content, but as generally small that Lemmy is, some users might feel that defederating from such a massive server not worth the lack of content and communication. Blahaj does great with protecting trans users I appreciate this, but I would suggest to consider the overall health of Lemmy overall and what such a drastic action might have on their own community. Could it results on the communities activity to decline due to less interaction?
There might be some bad communities and some other good ones on lemmy.ml, with activity and if the largest servers are defederated, now users will have to make multiple accounts on other servers and hope that they can see certain content, when it use to be if they wanted to make multiple accounts just because.
Multiple states: “Let’s literally use the force of law to ban trans people from existing.”
This jackoff: “Hmmm, I just don’t know if the bourgeoisie is really against trans rights! It’s so hard to tell!”
I’m not going to weigh in on the defederation issue. I don’t use enough .ml communities to know how this guy’s views reflect in the moderation policies of the instance. But fuck him in particular.
Generally .ml is pretty trans rights, because their mods are hexbear alts.
This is just petty splitter bullshit, same as always…
But I also block .ml because their mods policies annoy me.
ml is pretty trans rights, because their mods are hexbear alt
Hexbear has had its fair share of issues with sexism and objectification of trans women. There was a pretty big upset a while ago where people spoke up about being harassed, the community’s reaction to it was pretty shitty.
My experience is that hexbear only care about trans rights when criticizing “west”. As soon as China or Russia are discussed, they turn surprisingly silent.
YMMV
Yeah that’s probably fair, on a global political level. Still leaves them pretty rabid in terms of what they’ll let you say without banning you though.
I swear I’ve seen this exact comment in a similar thread some time ago. I think your take is flawed or even disingenuous. We all know that trans issues are manufactured outrage. Which is what nutomic appears to be saying.
This whole controversy with him reeks of comment baiting and using an off the cuff comment in order to undermine the Lemmy project. It’s no coincidence that this thread came up right after the devs say that they are running out of funding.
Why is it suddenly time to defederate with ml when this happened months ago.? The only real negative thing he said is about trans sports, but honestly I don’t think the lgbtq community gave a hot damn about highschool and college women’s sports before.
Oh, fuck off with your bigoted bullshit that “we all know”.
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This what you are doing here is called sealioning and you need to stop. You were denying the reality of transphobia and the struggles of trans people and you got called out for it. You need to take the feedback that you did something wrong and check yourself, they don’t owe you an explanation of their identities and experiences. You are an outsider in this safe-space for trans people.
Again with the bullshit intentional misrepresentation of what I said. It’s sus as hell that there’s such a push to destroy Lemmy when it’s one of the few safe places for trans people online.
You probably work for meta or musk or reddit trying to kill the project.
It’s sus as hell that there’s such a push to destroy Lemmy
It’s suspicious that the shitty deeds of the creators of software are coming to bite them in the ass?
You probably work for meta or musk or reddit trying to kill the project.
Ah yes, because bad-jacketing users is totally a way to make you seem credible. Fuck off dude, this is a trans friendly space. Who do you think you are coming here telling trans people they are “just being reactionary” then sealioning and bad-jacketing users when they call you out on your bullshit.
I don’t think anything significant would be lost by dumping ml. two years ago sure, the platform was too small but now ml is just annoying. I don’t know how the governance of that sever is set up. but if nutomic has control of the domain, its more a question of when will he decide to change ml rules. I trust ada to make the call when federation with ml becomes a problem. guess i’m just chiming in to reaffirm that for when the time comes. don’t know how lemmy as a platform grows long term if nutomic retains any level of control over it. but i’ll probably just be following you fuckin weirdos onto the next platform so it’s not that big a deal. maybe it could be a nostalgic return to internet forums.
I personally blocked ml a long time ago and my experience is much better for it. Their moderation and userbase leave much to be desired. As far as nutomic, I would say it seems like hes not a good person from what I know, and especially this post.
This feels like cherry picked examples to try and frame nutomic as being transphobic. Its always this one screenshot, of a comment made in response to something else that I have never seen posted any of the times this has been brought up. A response without context is kind of sus.
Being uninformed or misinformed is not bigotry. There was a time when I probably would have said something similar, before I learned more, and knew better. I don’t think this is strong evidence of a real issue.
Until the point that he makes more questionable statements about trans or lgbtqia2s+ people, this is fine as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think what I have seen so far is actionable.
Edit: from reading Ada’s comments in this thread I endorse her stance.
From the very strict enforcement standards of this instance, the DM was enough to warrant a ban for nutomic, but not enough to warrant defederation for ml. That seems fine until or unless more information comes to light.
It’s far worse than this. Grad is a NAFO supremacist demonic sub that has nothing to do with trans rights, and their supremacist brainwashing agenda should always be resisted, for its deep nazi militarist roots, and no one who is not banned from that cesspool should ever be taken seriously.
In specific text exchange, the persecution target’s crime is their supposed responsibility to correct the pigfucking stalker with expressing trans maximalism “of course men should be able to cheat at women’s sport by wearing a dress”. Disagreeing with that statement is objectively not anti-trans, and Grad supremacist brainworm circlejerk, is simply deflecting from no incriminating content whatsoever, other than justifying circular hatred.
ummmm… what?
this discussion is about lemmy.ml, not lemmygrad.
If you have anything relevant to my previous comment please say so. What you typed is incoherent.
If you have information about the exchange post a screenshot, and stop the insults and name calling.
cherry picked examples to try and frame nutomic as being transphobic.
I’m supporting that statement. I don’t need different screenshots from OP’s to point out that OP is showing a nothing burger.
Also, never seen lemmygrad. Just the NAFO troll site crossposted.
In that case, who or what do you mean by “grad?” And what is NAFO? I’m probably missing something.
meanwhileongrad is aNAFO militarist empire supremacist group. Unrelated shit disturbing nonsense is exemplified by this specific trolling.
Is this guy even real? lmao at this point he might as well admit to being a christo-facist
They’re doing what many TERFs do, trying to cover up their bigotry with politeness and trying to sound like it’s about logic or discussing the meaning of things. Trying to make their transphobia seem acceptable. Then they say trans people are unreasonable when they get called out or banned for their bigotry.
Well terfs are definitely nazis
I think defederating almost any instance is dumb, not my instance though so do what you will.
Personally, I don’t think his shitty views necessarily translate into .ml moderation policy and action, which to me would be the problem that defederation is meant to solve.
That said, I wouldn’t mind defed-ing from them in general, as most of my unpleasant interactions in the fediverse have been with .ml users.
Ultimately, I’ll back Ada on what she thinks and decides. She’s very level headed and strict with other instances as far as blahaj zones mission statement is concerned, and I trust her completely.
Yeah I’m really starting to regret making my Lemmy account with this server. At the time it was just the biggest one and I didn’t know anything about the type of communities they hosted. I tend to stay out of politics, I’m just here for the funny memes man
That’s like me and .world
There’s some dedicated Lemmy migration software, which copies your old subscriptions and probably other settings to your new account. At least, I remember using when I switched from .world to .dbzer0 quite some time ago. So you don’t have to hesitate from looking for a different instance to register on.
I personally haven’t seen any transphobic posts on .ml so I don’t see a reason to block the whole instance. I also see some folx ITT taking issue with the left-leaning user base of .ml, but I don’t think we should enforce political views that aren’t related to LGBT rights here.
taking issue with the left-leaning user base of .ml
Nobody who isn’t an avid .ml user thinks the problem is their leftism. If it was, instances like Blahaj and db0 would get the same hate. I’m guessing this is your Blahaj alt account?
Left leaning? They’re extremists parotting russian propaganda.
Theyre actively harming the left, and I think it’s by design.
Personally, I have a very poor opinion of nutomic. And yes, he has always been/felt transphobic. He has a history of making massive oversteps to attack people that have differing opinions to his, and overall I believe him to be a threat to the trans community. As for whether we should defederate? I really have no clue. It certainly isn’t a bastion for blatant transphobia, and hosts many of the top Lemmy communities, and a very large amount of the active Lemmy userbase. I think the effects of defederation would be immense, and take a lot of time and consideration to understand if it’s overall beneficial to the community. That being said, I’m sure I could be swayed to support either side. I’d be very curious what Ada has to say about this, as I believe I’ll support her opinion on the matter.
EDIT: I think it’s valuable to point out that any individual user can block an instance in their settings. So regardless of any defederation decision (which Ada seems opposed to), anyone can choose to block the instance themselves.
That is partially why I opened this thread. A community discussion is something that could be beneficial here in deciding what to do. There could be a lot of fallout from defederation though I don’t feel like it would be particularly bad since most communities on Lemmy.ml are already a thing elsewhere, and have more users there too, and most people who want to be here already have accounts here or would very quickly and easily make accounts here or on an instance that federates with us.
Although I don’t agree with nutomic’s stance (nor do I have any previous experience with them) the tone and language isn’t rude. It’s important to take that into consideration. There’s a difference between discussing opinions and just mindlessly slinging insults.
Regardless of the tone, the opinions he is discussing and the ways that he represents his views are inherently transphobic. He and his views are a threat to us at Blahaj Lemmy, being a space for queer folks (many of us are trans). He is also the lead developer of Lemmy, and the head admin of lemmy.ml. A statement does not have to be framed as a direct insult to be hateful and harmful, and the fact that these views of his have been persistent, along with his influence, means that he as a user is dangerous. Hence why he has been banned from this instance. The question being discussed is really if his views are reflected into the community and moderation at lemmy.ml, because that is the point at which the instance is harmful enough to defederate from. If lemmy.ml is a place where transphobia is allowed to propagate, then that is immensely harmful for us. We need to protect ourselves against transphobia.
All I ask is that it not be ignored completely. I’m not close enough to the situation to make any decisions.
I can promise that it is not being ignored here. It is being considered fully for the transphobic garbage that it is, which is why Nutomic is banned instance-wide since 9 months ago when his DM leaked.
lol I didn’t realize that he’d already gotten himself banned. Never mind.
yeah. i mean isn’t this what downvotes and bans are for? instead of defederation?
lemmy.blahah.zone does not allow downvotes. And the concern is moreso that some transphobic content wouldn’t be moderated (based on nutomic’s views), hence the burden of moderation would come down to our instance’s admins, and that simply shouldn’t be their responsibility. Defederation is for situations in which the instance in question is harmful to the community in the instance defederating. And if transphobia is not properly moderated, and transphobic views are allowed to spread, then that is actively harmful to lemmy.blahaj.zone.
gotcha. i figured all posts could be up/downvoted. kinda still new here.
gotcha. thanks!
Blahaj.zone doesn’t enable downvotes. As for bans. Sure. If it’s a handful of one-off users. But if this speaks to the larger instance culture on .ml that’s where defederation is considered, and because it’s one of the lead admins, it speaks to their ability and willingness to keep their instance safe.
Personally, I would make the argument that Lemmy.ml, as the flagship server, has a culture far less impacted by the admin/developers views then any other instance.
I’m not wedded to that though. Consider it more a theory then a statement of fact.
If they were more hands off I would agree but they do a lot of modding from the admin chair.
There are also plenty of other reasons to defed from them as well, I made a post here a few days ago recaping that as well as links to some documentation of it
I mean, the two big communities for me are [email protected] and [email protected], though the latter of which isn’t really active anyway so I wouldn’t be sad to see it go. There isn’t a suitable replacement for the Linux community elsewhere, and that’s honestly what I’m most active on, but if we defeferate, I’d probably just cut my losses. Yes, it is easy for people to create new accounts, but the hassle is that you cannot transfer your comments or posts to a new account, so you lose that history (as I’ve had to deal with). But overall, I think most people on ml would just stop seeing posts from our instance and never think about it. It would be a small minority that would even notice, but the majority would be getting less content from diverse voices in the queer community overall. Again, it would just take a lot of consideration.
There isn’t a suitable replacement for the Linux community elsewhere
What about [email protected] or [email protected]? Those seem decently active.
but the hassle is that you cannot transfer your comments or posts to a new account
That is a minor drawback. It would be nice if they implemented ownership transfer abilities for posts and comments, though it’ll probably be a while before we see that.
But overall, I think most people on ml would just stop seeing posts from our instance and never think about it. It would be a small minority that would even notice, but the majority would be getting less content from diverse voices in the queer community overall. Again, it would just take a lot of consideration.
I can see how and why this would be a problem and why this should be carefully considered, that can be a poor outcome. I guess the same can be said for any defederation including the feddit.uk one. It all depends I guess on how they handle these issues going forward and also how they handle this subject overall. If a lot of the people there are “I support trans people but I don’t think kids…” (you get the idea) it doesn’t really do much good to federate with them. At least in my opinion.
What about [email protected] or [email protected]? Those seem decently active.
The former of the two (which is also the larger of them) has 13% of the userbase, although you’re correct that it does seem fairly active. I suppose that would be a decent place to migrate to if defederation were to happen, although I tend to mostly help out new users, who tend to flock to the larger community. Again, I’d figure it out if it happened, it wouldn’t actually be a problem. The latter of the two I would not consider very active by comparison.
That is a minor drawback. It would be nice if they implemented ownership transfer abilities for posts and comments, though it’ll probably be a while before we see that.
Yes, this is one of the grievances I had when migrating here from lemmy.world, as I have some very detailed and helpful comments I wish were easier for me to find. I’d love to see that as a feature in the future, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
I can see how and why this would be a problem and why this should be carefully considered, that can be a poor outcome. I guess the same can be said for any defederation including the feddit.uk one. It all depends I guess on how they handle these issues going forward and also how they handle this subject overall. If a lot of the people there are “I support trans people but I don’t think kids…” (you get the idea) it doesn’t really do much good to federate with them. At least in my opinion.
Yes, I agree here. What I suppose I’m basically trying to say is that defederation is an extreme option, so it has to be considered carefully. If the community on ml starts to reflect transphobic views, then absolutely that would warrant defederation. But if it’s a single admin, and it’s otherwise being moderated to remove transphobic content, then I do think it’s really difficult to determine without a lot more consideration. In most other situations, banning a single transphobic user may be sufficient. It all depends on how his views are reflected in the moderation and the content of the community as a whole. If it’s resulting in transphobia, then it becomes a much more clear case. I don’t have enough information to know if that is in fact the case.
The solution is to organically marginalize .ml by supporting other activitypub projects. Then we get past the whole issue of major communities being hosted there, or them being a necessity institution.
Honestly, yes. I definitely agree that this is the way to go.
I’m not on my blahaj account, but I can copy/paste there if you’d prefer. Just seemed pointless when I use the same user name to switch over.
But I’m mainly giving some background to the whole matter, rather than primarily “voting” about defederation.
It’s interesting that nutomic wants to get all het up after asking for donations to lemmy development.
That’s largely why they’ve been so active in comments lately. They can’t seem to keep from expecting people to pay them as individuals the develop lemmy, while also not being willing to at least be clear about where they stand.
And that’s what the donation requests are about. They’re not bringing in enough to develop full time. And that’s an important thing, having full time developers on a project like this. What they don’t seem to get is that they’re not just asking us to pay for full time developers, they’re asking us to pay them. They aren’t figureheads or managers, so it isn’t some kind of collective where you can point to other members of the dev team and say “well, maybe those two are unpleasant, but at least the rest aren’t bigoted”
Which, afaik, dessalines has never publicly been bigoted. He can be a smug asshole sometimes, but so can I, so there’s only so much complaining I can do there. But nutomic is a different issue, and this screen shot perfectly encapsulates how.
Donations would go into both of their pockets for their work, and they do deserve to be paid for that. Even jerks get to make a living. But we all get the choice as to whether or not we’re a customer or not. Me? My double digit yearly open source budget is going to people that at least have the sense to have never shot their mouths off with bigoted bullshit. Lemmy is an amazing thing, and the world needs it. I just can’t directly support a bigot. I can’t, and won’t do it.
I wouldn’t hire on someone to fix my roof if they had a damn maga hat on, why would I give money to someone that is not only just as much of a bigot, but is also hyper authoritarian? I know hiring someone vs contributing to a project isn’t a 1:1 equivalency, but the principle is.
Donations to then also fund .ml. And if anyone wants to donate like that, it’s none of my business. It’s just important that it be known that you can’t donate granularly. You donate, .ml gets some operating costs covered, dessalines gets a chunk, and nutomic gets a chunk.
And that’s where this comes from. The discussion in the screen shot is fallout from that. Nutomic still holds the same views they always have, but wants people to ignore that when donating. Which is fine!
As far as defederation goes, all I can say is that, while I have had unpleasant runins with both of them, I’ve never been permanently banned from .ml, or any of its communities. Individual communities there can, and do, enforce anti-bigotry rules with no interference from admins. But, there are no specific instance rules regarding transphobia in particular.
Again, this is pretty much just added background for anyone that hasn’t the time to go digging for the context of the screen shots.
I saw this earlier in [email protected] and it’s pretty bad. I’m in favor of defederation, at the very least to help cut some of .ml’s network effect on the Fediverse. Since many of their communities are insanely large and they’re also very well known for banning people for let’s just say less than justified reasons. Nutomic’s transphobia is really the last straw in my opinion. If people are interested in looking for alternative to popular .ml communities, [email protected] is a good place to look.
I don’t think anyone needs to stop using or break away from Lemmy like people say. Lemmy is open-source and can easily be forked. Lemmy’s devs don’t have the authority to deny people from using Lemmy either. Instances operate independent of them, and since many instances are already here and using Lemmy, switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.
I agree with you but I do want to clarify this point.
switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.
Since Lemmy uses the underlying ActivityPub protocol you can use something completely different and it is compatible. For example in response to this latest drama with Lemmy devs I switched to fedia.io, which is running on Mbin and not Lemmy. Mbin is compatible with Lemmy because Mbin also uses ActivityPub. The compatibility happens on a protocol level not the service level. You can go search up Mbin magazines (which is essentially the same thing as a community) and interact with the same way as you would with a Lemmy community. You can’t set up a community on an Mastodon instance because it doesn’t have that functionality but you can theoretically comment in Lemmy and Mbin communities thanks to the ActivityPub. You can also use Piefed as it fills the same social media niche. The platforms that are incompatible would be platforms that are not using ActivityPub.
Instance owners can’t just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it’s not that simple. But for the average user you can create an Mbin account and as long as the instance is federated with all the instances your Lemmy account was then you can subscribe to all the community you were subscribed to before and the only functional difference in your daily usage is the sorting algorithm (. For instance owners the only possible solution may to be have a migratory period where you have two instances running, so people could slowly transition from one instance to another but looking at how hard it was to get people to move from Reddit I think moving instances is a whole other topic.
I’m not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won’t be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.
Instance owners can’t just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it’s not that simple.
That was really my whole point, since the databases aren’t compatible. A switch from Lemmy to something else would reboot the instance completely. But also it’s not necessary for instances that aren’t lemmy.ml. Maybe some instances out there are loyal to .ml but that doesn’t mean all of them are. This one certainly isn’t and neither is my main one dbzer0.
I’m not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won’t be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.
That’s good, I see a surprising amount of people saying that users and instance owners should switch to piefed or mbin over this as a form of “boycott” which I think is dumb because we don’t have any onligation to give money to the devs, to support them, or even to federate with them. This instance banned nutomic for his transphobic rhetoric, and quokk.au defederates all of .ml as a whole.
