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 @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, 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 @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.
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.