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.
Your entire opinion is null and void when you don’t even get the nuances of why they would even start to express their support for Russia in the Ukrainian war, you just assume they like totalitarianism, incredible attitude
Justifying mass summary killings of Ukrainians is wrong. Alleged claims of nuance is a red herring.
The tankie scum have never lived in Ukraine (or russia) and don’t speak Ukrainian (or russian). They openly deny Ukraine’s right to self-determination and white-wash russian atrocities with regressive bullshit about “the BIA faked it!1!!”.
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.
Just to clarify, the defederation from feddit.uk has more to do with the admins allowing transphobic comments to remain because of the EHRC ruling and then ghosting Ada when asked to clarify their policies around dealing with transphobia. It wasn’t just one user.
I still agree with considering lemmy.ml for defederation.
the admins allowing transphobic comments to remain
This is a pretty blahaj-centric view of what happened. Their definition of “transphobia” includes “I feel like women with super high testosterone levels competing in women’s sports does get into kind of a legitimate gray area,” “I don’t think dragon is a gender and this person is clearly a malicious troll,” and “dude.”
I don’t think anyone on Lemmy is down with unambiguous transphobia, but blahaj likes to take sort-of-maybe-arguably transphobic or questionable comments and pretend they are Hitler-level hatefulness and then ban anyone who refuses to see it in their 100% un nuanced way.
ghosting Ada when asked to clarify their policies around dealing with transphobia
When did this happen? I mean, they don’t really owe her an explanation, they can run their server the way they want just like she can hers.
If I went to Ada and started demanding she “clarify” her policies on dragon centered trolling she probably wouldn’t spend too much time giving me extensive clarifications on it. Nor should I be able to demand that she needs to.
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.
the devs of lemmy are already working on it full time. they’re not the ones who do most of the moderation work.
the thing i’ve always hated about most people outside ml is that they always make assumptions, not even wondering if what they’re saying might be false. if you’re gonna be prissy about something, at least get your facts straight.
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.
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.
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.
Your entire opinion is null and void when you don’t even get the nuances of why they would even start to express their support for Russia in the Ukrainian war, you just assume they like totalitarianism, incredible attitude
This is a ridiculous statement.
Justifying mass summary killings of Ukrainians is wrong. Alleged claims of nuance is a red herring.
The tankie scum have never lived in Ukraine (or russia) and don’t speak Ukrainian (or russian). They openly deny Ukraine’s right to self-determination and white-wash russian atrocities with regressive bullshit about “the BIA faked it!1!!”.
Nutomic is banned from blahaj anyway.
That alone isn’t exactly hard to have happen.
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.
Just to clarify, the defederation from feddit.uk has more to do with the admins allowing transphobic comments to remain because of the EHRC ruling and then ghosting Ada when asked to clarify their policies around dealing with transphobia. It wasn’t just one user.
I still agree with considering lemmy.ml for defederation.
This is a pretty blahaj-centric view of what happened. Their definition of “transphobia” includes “I feel like women with super high testosterone levels competing in women’s sports does get into kind of a legitimate gray area,” “I don’t think dragon is a gender and this person is clearly a malicious troll,” and “dude.”
I don’t think anyone on Lemmy is down with unambiguous transphobia, but blahaj likes to take sort-of-maybe-arguably transphobic or questionable comments and pretend they are Hitler-level hatefulness and then ban anyone who refuses to see it in their 100% un nuanced way.
When did this happen? I mean, they don’t really owe her an explanation, they can run their server the way they want just like she can hers.
If I went to Ada and started demanding she “clarify” her policies on dragon centered trolling she probably wouldn’t spend too much time giving me extensive clarifications on it. Nor should I be able to demand that she needs to.
Source? That’s not what the feddit.uk admins said.
As a feddit.nl user it would help if you included the TLD, there are several servers that call themselves feddit. 😊
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.
the devs of lemmy are already working on it full time. they’re not the ones who do most of the moderation work.
the thing i’ve always hated about most people outside ml is that they always make assumptions, not even wondering if what they’re saying might be false. if you’re gonna be prissy about something, at least get your facts straight.
Funny, why is it so common to see the lead dev in the modlog, then?
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.