I get that people aren't a fan of their type of leftist politics but I don't think they really do that much harm. I at least haven't seen any brigading or vitriol from them and I think they're valuable as a trans-positive space.
Blahaj Lemmy Meta
Blåhaj Lemmy is a Lemmy instance attached to blahaj.zone. This is a group for questions or discussions relevant to either instance.
I'm going to use my last post here before the vote to say, it was massively irresponsible to federate with these trolls before consulting with the community you administrate. I'm sure they spun you a good sob story but they've hurled abuse at your users that you're apparently happy to let go unanswered. And you say they deserve a second chance. Wait staff gets your order wrong? That deserves a second chance, restaurants are chaotic and shit happens. Person shows up to work late? So much shit happens in the Dat to day, you can't possibly plan for everything, absolutely give a second chance. A bunch of tankie trolls use your instance as their entertainment? Absolutely fucking not. You get a second chance for a mistake, not active malice. I'd buy into the "Trans solidarity" lie if they didn't admit in their own instance this was about "dunking on us". They're here to recruit and make fun, and they made no bones about it on their own server. Not to put too fine a point on it, you fell for the first nazi at the bar. For the tankies, I know you're not nazis, you just use the same style arguments and are equally as tolerant of people who dont share your beliefs.
Long story short, I could not give less of a shit what Hexbear does on their own server but they've been extremely detrimental to our own communities and that not being considered a factor at all is beyond absurd
As an admin you have a duty to those you administrate and you've essentially told them that the abuse they've suffered is inconsequential in the face of Trans solidarity The same Trans solidarity Hexbear uses to abuse your users, willfully and maliciously. That's not good enough for me.
I don't know what Hexbar is, all I know is that tankies make online spaces toxic. I don't really care if they're federated or not (I am new to fediverse idk what this means), but from what I gathered about Hex they're not good people
Fuckin' ludicrous. Absolutely fuckin' ridiculous. Where was this restraint with lemmynsfw? Where was the "wait and mull things over" there? Why shoot from the hip in one instance and hold fire on the other one? Goddamn, the hypocrisy is palpable.
As people have said, I'm trying to maintain some cohesion in trans protective instances. If we defederate then the majority of trans protective instances will be isolated from each other, and I don't want that to happen. I am absolutely giving hexbear more slack for that reason.
I was listening to a podcast the other day ( https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510282/pop-culture-happy-hour ) and learned about a new phrase: "rep sweats".
When you have a person who is aligned with a specific minority group encountering a piece of media or interest or subculture that provides positive representation of their specific minority group, that there is an inherent pesky need to WANT to like that specific thing EVEN IF it's not very good.
I feel like that's exactly what's happening here with Hexbear. They're self-admitted trolls. But they're friendly to trans people... so we're having rep-sweats about aligning with them.
It's supposedly a sign that your minitory group has truly taken hold in society when one can confidently look at a piece of, say, trans-aligned media and say "Yeah, it's got trans representation in it... but it's not good and I don't like it."
We have very much not taken hold in society. We are under attack in ways that are often quite literally killing us, and unlike the fediverse at large, the threadiverse is full of trans hostile folk on generalist instances, many with admins that won't deal with anything but the most egregious transphobia.
I genuinely believe that empowering trans communities and trans folk in the threadiverse is super important in changing that.
Splitting us apart makes that harder, and keeps the threadiverse more hostile overall. Of course, sticking together doesn't help if the hostility is coming from within the house, but my hope is that we can get that part sorted out. Maybe we can't, and if that's the case, we will do what we have to do, but I would like to make the attempt, because I think that in the long term, learning to work with other trans protective instances will empower us all
Imo Moss should not be a moderator
196 is looking for mods. I assume you will be applying.
Lots of good points in this thread, but I'd like to offer that even if everyone on hexbear were terrible annoying people, I'm an adult who can block content for myself.
Defederating is good for when an instance is hosting illegal content and you need to keep it off our servers, or if an instance is spamming stuff with bots and abusing the fediverse, but when it comes to content I do or don't want to see, I want to make that decision myself.
Right? People talk about how frequently they utilize the block button and it's like... keep doing that! Don't ruin federation for everyone else because your sensibilities and your politics make it hard for you to interact with others!
We should primarily defederate:
- nazis, because their ideology inherently calls for violence against marginalized groups based on their race, religion, sexuality, etc.
- Gore, due to its ability to cause trauma simply by viewing
- Illegal content for which Blahaj could be held liable
Yes, this exactly. I left another instance because of too heavy-handed moderation, don’t really want it again, and especially not over a problem that began when someone didn’t like seeing annoying things in the All feed and Lemmy’s broken sorting.
I'm from hexbear and ngl i'm like, idk, pretty embarassed by how a lot of the other hexbear users were acting in regards to the news of the defed question, i decided to like make an account here too in case of defederation so i can still post in your queer communities too - though i've decided to like not upvote any posts in this thread or cast a vote in the poll next week since i have an obvious bias towards remaining federated with hexbear and think it would be unfair to like, interfer with the blahaj community's decision
::: spoiler Edit: ok wtf, I've been looking through the blahaj communities to see which to sub too and it's literally 1984 that the hexbear mods purposely didn't let us federate with this comm:
(iirc they purposely turned off federation with all communities marked as nsfw, since they couldn't specifically defed individual nsfw comms that they thought were problematic)
I hope we can have camaraderie between them. This issue is very polarising here, so I'm really interested to see what the vote is gonna be.
I've seen their "fite me bro" style comments and a bit of sussy posts, but I'm otherwise unfamiliar with the deep lore. I agree with Ada's proposed solution and perhaps in a week their community will have made changes to this behavior.
After spending some time in their threads, hexbear seems pretty drama-pilled. I think saying we can individually block them is cope, they will just bother anybody who doesn't know about this drama and to block them until the end of time.
Their newsposting and news takes are really good, though.
This whole thing was a shitshow and I regret that any of it happened. I did add fuel to the fire in the first discussion thread and I wish I didn't. I hope that something like this never happens again. We were definitely not innocent in this drama. It was sort of necessary that either instance defederates as I could see the infighting going on indefinitely. Hopefully Ada can take a well deserved break now.
I would like to highlight this quote from the admin lemm.ee from their similar discussion on hexbear:
Let me play the devil’s advocate here and employ some “self-whataboutism”: among all users that have been banned on lemm.ee for bigotry, the majority were actually not users from other instances, and in fact people with lemm.ee accounts. If we judge any larger instance only by bigoted posts that some of its users make, then we might as well declare all instances as cesspools and close down Lemmy completely. I believe it’s far more useful to judge instances based on moderation in response to such content. Just as we remove bigoted content from lemm.ee, I have also witnessed bigoted content being removed from hexbear.
Thank you, Ada, for your hard work.