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Blahaj is a shit place, so no surprise. You can support the biggest warmongers and dictators on planet earth, but as long as you dont’t have some mild criticism of the lgbtq community, you’re good to go.
Pathetic instance with a really fucked up moral compass.
Drag got banned for sharing a message in which the admin promised to stop harassment. Drag thought the admin had kept the promise and was showing proof of it. But in fact, the admin had broken the promise, and banned drag, because she thought drag was trying to call her a liar.
Wouldn’t have happened if the admin had just stopped the harassment.
out of the loop – what did we do wrong?
One of the head honchos on ml had some rant about trans people being part of the bourgeoisie agenda or some shit. Which of course, raises eyebrows about how this crowd in general was so against voting and standing up to the guy who is currently actively stripping transgender rights. I’m sure you’re not all transphobes but the fact that this comes from someone at the head of a community, does make one look at the big push to not vote a little differently and makes it look like there’s more reasons for it than just being too cool for school.
Seems like Blahaj has no issue with ML supporting russian genocidal imperialism and the way russia treats LGBT folks. It seems their concern about trans folks rights doesn’t include Ukrainian trans folks (and Ukrainian LGBT folks more broadly) who were forced to leave the territories occupied by russia.
Compare that to the decision to defederate over a single post (that explicitly stated that everyone should be treated equally and not discriminated against) on feddit.uk.
For some reason the term orientalism comes to mind.
For some reason I’ve always gotten a very white vibe from blahaj.zone. I can’t explain it, but I just don’t feel that nonwhite people are exactly as welcome there. I’ve felt that way in a lot of trans spaces in the past that were very centered on a white view of transness. The racism is never overt, there’s just a vibe hanging over those kinds of spaces. I don’t have the language to say how I feel that vibe is there, but a lot of people have written about it
In this case, it’s not even a white thing. Purely a cultural thing, a lack concern about LGBT communities that don’t speak English.
Btw, this is not mere observation from the sidelines. I live in Ukraine and have a modicum of exposure to the local LGBT community.
I think I can remember Ada saying in the past that her intention with blahaj.zone is to create a safe space for trans people. Not to support trans people outside that space. And I think that’s wrong. Trans inclusivity needs to be explicitly political. There is no safety for trans people in a community disconnected from the global trans struggle.
Can that hypocrite leave already?
allpoetry.com/First-They-Came-For-The-Communists
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
Eta: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scratch_a_liberal_and_you'll_find_a_fascist
What does the poem have to do with the “scratch a liberal” idiom.
This seems like a non sequitur.
It means I argued that your life was worth saving. I wonder how many in these threads would pull the trigger on Chairman Fred?
I find that trashing on all of Lemmy development and lemmy.ml from nutomic’s one questionable stance to be a little idiotic, but that’s just my opinion. Those things are the work of more than just one person. Dessalines is a heavy lifter in moderation and development, and they’re pretty decent. Various contributors have provided code/features, translations, apps and interfaces to Lemmy. Moderators of all server types have their own opinions on stuff.
But to an extent we all have to put that aside, because face it, perfectly sanitized opinions have nothing to do with code quality. We all have a couple shitty opinions, but what makes someone a decent human being and not a bigot is recognizing where their actions and opinions cause harm unto others and try to minimize that. This harm reduction can include changing actions and opinions, but it can also be keeping harmful actions and opinions away from people it would harm. This is where Ada probably sees banning nutomic from the instance as sufficient rather than all of .ml
Yeah, the whole China/Russia can do no wrong sort of thing is a pervasive problem on Lemmy.ml, but likewise they keep moderation of that to within the confines of their instance. The running costs of a server are virtually nothing compared to cost of working full-time to maintain software, so most donations don’t really go to hosting the .ml server itself but rather to development. I don’t personally agree with the .ml admins on many things, but I’ll defend them for allowing others to run online communities how they want in return for letting every one of us do the same. I’ve likewise defended Ada’s decisions on how they want to root out transphobia from their server, that’s their choice, and so far it seems to have served Blahaj users well.
Personally the sooner we rip off that bandaid, the better. .ml is far from the only activity pub project out there, but they are absolutely one of the most toxic forces on the fediverse and seriously harm the on boarding experience for new users. Nutomic is a bigot and a liar and Dessalines is a cringe keyboard warrior and nobody would put up with them if they weren’t writing code. But if Lemmy is no longer the only mature option for federated social media, why should we continue to tolerate their shit?
Yeah fuck them lol. I’d like to see how their platform does without users. Then it’ll just be a fun little coding project for them, nothing more. There’s already other options. At least Piefed is actively working on adding missing features and improving the end user experience. And isn’t stuck in 1999.
It’s very cool that they built this platform and much appreciated. But if they’re then going to turn around and act like trans people shouldn’t be concerned about transphobia if it comes from one of their own, because we should all be grateful and thankful to our overlords instead, then they can shove their fkn half baked platform.
I think this is an inconsistent move from the Blahaj team. They defederated feddit over one transphobic user who the admins wouldn’t deal with. And I agree with that decision. They should make the same decision here. If lemmy.ml won’t ban Nutomic, then it’s clear they aren’t interested in creating a safe environment for trans people.
Regardless of any funding question, I think every instance should be questioning federation with .ml over their acceptance of Nutomic. And that goes double for any instance committed to inclusivity, because they have a responsibility to their users to uphold the values those users expect.
I don’t think it’s inconsistent. My understanding is that the bad comments were in private messages and although they don’t disown then or apologise for their views, they are not making transphobic comments in threads.
In the feddit case, transphobia discourse was active and unmoderated. I have no doubt that if that was the case for .ml, then blahaj would defederate.
There is no point in federation of you defederate from every instance with bad users. Ban the user, not the instance. In the case of an instance not moderating hateful content, ban the instance.
I can definitely understand how this may seem as an inconsistency on Ada’s part. I’ve been critical of Ada in the past, but I see this as more of Ada taking a calculated, diplomatic approach.
With the Feddit situation, Feddit is just another random Lemmy instance, so there’s no real loss in defederating. But ML is where Lemmy development is centered, and whether Blahaj users like it or not, they do have an intrinsic interest in the development of Lemmy’s code. They want Blahaj to be a safe space, which requires moderation tools to be developed, and it’s helpful to keep an open connection with the developers in that case so that Blahaj’s input and contributions can be considered when these tools are built.
At least, that’s just my speculation as to why there’s an inconsistency.
I think it would be better for Lemmy’s development if everyone defederated lemmy.ml. If Dessalines weren’t so busy banning users on other instances for pointing out the Uyghur genocide, he’d have a lot more time to write code.
From what I understand the transphobic comment from nutomic was from a publicized DM. So it’s a stretch, in that sense, to seek defederating an instance over it, as the ban is justified to begin with.
People shouldn’t send transphobic nonsense in private messages either
I halfway agree with you, the first part at least: I don’t mind if people have opinions I think are wrong or stupid. It is fine. Unpopular opinion, I also think letting nutomic have some kind of transphobia and talk about it is fine. The alternative is that every opinion that someone thinks is “incorrect” gets driven underground where no one talks about it, and so anyone who does hold that view can’t really have a conversation about it or learn where and how exactly they are wrong. It just festers, and eventually they find more people who also think that way, and none of them talk about it in public because they’ve learned not to. It’s just a stupid cultural feature.
This stance does make it kind of silly that Ada defederated from some other server because of one random user on there, saying that if the admins won’t ban that user then how can she protect her users against ever seeing someone with a wrong opinion, and so bang, defederation. For some reason, the exact same logic does not apply to lemmy.ml even though the one random user in this case is also an admin. Who knows. But anyway, for my opinion she is making the right call in this case, and made the wrong call in the previous one-random-user case.
To me, the great sin of .ml isn’t their bad opinions, although they are very bad. It is that they are unapologetically heavy-handed about manipulating the conversation to require their users to hold those opinions also. That to me is terrible. It’s dishonest. It’s like sending fake votes out into the network, it’s like editing people’s comments after they write them. It’s just wrong. I think someone who takes that attitude towards other people’s communications has no place on a shared network where we cooperate to get communication done, and the fact that those other people have accounts on their server and so “belong to them” or whatever doesn’t in any way excuse it.
I don’t know what’s in their heads that they think “these users are ours, so we can do what we like with their content” is reasonable. Also, to be honest, I don’t know why people put up with it. I think the propaganda that recasts it as “defending the space” from bigotry or Western propaganda has a lot to do with it, sort of putting up a distorted reality where what they are doing is actually some other, unrelated, thing, and so people look at it in that light instead. I don’t know.
Anyway, I sorta agree with you on the main thing. nutomic holding opinions I think are wrong isn’t a crisis. People can think what they want as long as they’re honest about it and let other people be honest about it too. That’s my feeling.
The liberals have really begun to stink the place up ever since they jumped ship en masse from Reddit. They joined a platform created & maintained by communists and constantly shit stir with the “look at what Lemmy.ml is doing”. Lemmy.ml is one of the biggest and original instances and it’s plainly obvious that transphobia isn’t tolerated there. That’s what the community demands, regardless of nutomic. Likely it has more trans users than most instances that people are using to complain about nutomic.
The same people simply have it in for Lemmy.ml and won’t stop until every instance defederates from it. Nutomic’s views are just another means for them to achieve that goal.
Maybe one of them will step up and create their own alternative platform and they can all clear off to that one for good.
The liberals
People who use the word “liberal” as a slur like this are some of the worst people on this planet.
Do you have a better name for people with middle ground political views?
That would be moderate or centrist, but I’m not sure why you’re asking. Liberalism is the opposite of authoritarianism and fascism, not the synonym of centrism.
Replace “liberal” with whichever word you prefer, the point remains
Personally, I don’t care that they are communists. A lot of it is just that they’re dicks. I would feel almost the exact same way if they were MAGA people, or pro-Nancy Pelosi people, or for that matter Bernie Sanders people or just non-political people, that harassed and banned and mocked anyone who disagreed with them in the same way that .ml does.
I’ve only ever seen one comment from nutomic cited as evidence of transphobia. And its a DM responding to some mystery comment that is never posted alongside it. A bit suspicious when the only evidence is presented without context.
Though it does contain the transphobic dogwhistle, “biological woman,” but that term is also one a reasonable person could reasonably reach from a place of ignorance. He also admitted to knowing very little about trans issues.
Also the trans comments are just one in a list of things. Without context there’s no way to know if those even are his own ideas, or a summery of the mystery comment he’s responding to, but also clearly disagrees with.
The opposition to nutomic on the basis of transphobia feels very much like a witch hunt. This doesn’t seem like strongly held anti-trans beliefs. People are occasionally wrong or misinformed about things. And that’s okay!
He hasn’t apologised. If he knew very little about trans people back then, that’s bad, because he’s a socialist and should be educating himself on the whole sphere of leftism. But refusing to apologise after all this criticism, all the dozens of people who’ve asked him to apologise to his face? That means he’s really truly thought about the issue, and he isn’t ashamed of his comment.
If you want to control who uses your platform and to police wrongthink, it’s best not release your project as open source with federation features.
This is common sense.
Communists don’t want to go through socialism to get to communism. That’s socialists. Marxist-Leninists are socialists, not communism. You sound like you’re an anarcho-communist. You’re more of a communist than Marxist-Leninists are.
