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Ada makes the wrong decisions literally every time she has a moderation choice.
A coin would have a better track record.
She frequently gives in to trolls over users and bans anyone who dares criticize her
I can’t beleive I used to want to participate in that space.
I was banned from all of Bahaj for using “dude” then questioning if dude was the word someone was taking offense of and as the word I misgendered them with.
Meta-pronouns was already a bridge too far.
Yeah, one time she banned drag for pointing out she broke a promise, and drag didn’t even mean to! Drag thought she kept the promise and was telling a harasser they’d been told to cut it out. Turns out she didn’t, and banned drag for making her look bad. You’re right, wrong decision every time.
Good to see you’re still around, Drag. Hope you’re doing well!
You joke and stuff, but the fact remains that Ada is ok with the support for russian genocidal imperialism among tankie instances (Grad, ML, hexbear) and even has no issues with russia’s brutality against their LGBT community.
Theatrics about “TERF island” are clearly a much bigger priority than actual abuse of LGBT folks (and cis folks for that matter) at the hands of the russians.
Drag isn’t joking. Drag’s ban was the result of a very serious debate about best practice for talking people down from suicide. Drag did so in a way some users disagreed with, and there was a very clear harassment campaign from one user. Ada didn’t shut it down because she agreed with that user’s take. Blahaj isn’t a safe place even for trans people within the community if the admin decides they’re not worth protecting. Drag believed Blahaj’s messages of being a safe space, and got banned very specifically for believing in Ada. Blahaj fails members of its own community, and punishes them for expecting better.
Fuck Ada, she can go suck a dick.
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.
mild criticism
You misspelled “totally innocent unrelated comment which stepped on some kind of weird and arbitrary rule which they will swear is hateful and proof you are a bad person on purpose, BAN!”
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.
Way to go drag you ruined it for everyone.
God tier troll shit tbh.
Me thinking it was someone else describing the situation until i look at the username: 😐
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
I’ve gotten a “youth” vibe from there.
That sort of militant mindset kids tend to have about the thing they’re passionate about.
There is no room for discussion OR nuance and any perceived slight is not allowed to be corrected.
Just militant follow my rules and my view or gtfo, similar to the tanker triad in that regard tbh.
I feel it’s more of an American thing than a white thing. They seem to view lgbt-phobia as an America-centric issue
The admin is Australian…
😐
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?
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.
Well said. Ada’s stance is reasonable, and whoever keeps bringing this up should consider taking a trip to their account settings and blocking users, communities and instances to their hearts’ desire instead of pressing others to do it for them.
Nutomic is banned from blahaj anyway.
That alone isn’t exactly hard to have happen.
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!!”.
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.
then ghosting Ada
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.
Dessalines does a ton of the moderation on .ml. He and davel are, as far as I can tell, the main moderators for the whole server and all its communities.
I’m not subscribed to most of their stuff, so it’s hard to check for hard numbers or verify that, but I see him all the time on the “let’s complain about Lemmy.ml moderation” subs. Doing a quick spot-check in the modlog for [email protected], which I am subscribed to, I see:
- 46% of moderation actions were by davel
- 39% by dessalines
- 12% by Arthur Besse
- 2% by nutomic
- 0% by the moderators of the community
That’s extremely consistent with what I have observed from the rest of the communities on the server.
not even wondering if what they’re saying might be false
Why do I hear Alanis Morissette in the distance?
the devs of lemmy are already working on it full time. they’re not the ones who do most of the moderation work.
Funny, why is it so common to see the lead dev in the modlog, then?
the lemmy.ml modlog is obfuscated. it only says “mod” when you look at who did the moding. plus, the last time the lead devs were appointed as mods was at least 3 years ago, for both dessalines and nutomic, during the reddit exodus.
unless there is information i somehow missed, you’re just proving my point
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.
out of the loop – what did we do wrong?
One of the main admins / devs basically said that the whole “transgender thing” was just a smoke screen and another part of the culture wars the bourgeoisie is using to divide us.
It was very dismissive and minimizing and … honestly gross.
It is indicative of their mindset overall and how myopic and “in their rigid lane” they are. Also just a wildly gross shit take.
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.
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
Nice and all, but how is this relevant?
Irony is dead.
tbh I don’t know how I was supposed to know this was a joke.
K. This isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of politicians getting rid of classical (liberal arts) education. STEM is important, so are philosophy, logic, etc.
https://literarydevices.net/irony/
Itt, situational irony. So my statement was irony, expressing the situational irony on display.
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?
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.
People at home will moan about fascists and loss of their illusory freedoms at home, cheering when communists gain traction in other states, talking big about revo while the wolf is at their door, and 100% fling open the windows and invite in the fascist fox for cuddles and Netflix.
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.
Socially left and economically right isn’t left.
Replace “liberal” with whichever word you prefer, the point remains
Yeah, Marxist-Leninists. You’re in between anarchists and capitalists.
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 man,” 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!
Edit: misremembered the specific language in the quote
some context
Thanks so much for posting this. Since you’re clearly more familiar with nutomic, and this conversation do you think my assessment is off base?
This context doesn’t change my conclusion, but I’m clearly a prime target for confirmation bias as I made up my mind before seeing it.
Nutomic is banned from blahaj anyway.
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.
Bit of a dual edged sword.
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.
This meme is my views, using Marxist-Leninist definitions. Of course it’s nonsense, ML newspeak is designed to make anarchism incomprehensible.
