Hey everyone. Some of you may have seen the recent announcement with blahaj to defederate with the instance. Ive been handling things privately and wanted to do an announcement to catch you all up on the results of that
#1: Background knowledge
Realized that not everyone knows how the instance is structured so figured I would do a little section in the front to go over that (especially for visitors reading this from other instances)
We currently have 8 admins in the instance. Of those 2 people are currently lead admins (snowe and I). Majority of admins are part of the community team but not all of them (people are split between infrastructure, development, and community). I was planning out a team page similar to what lemmy.world has to go over this with a bit more detail and that should be coming in the future. Main thing though is its intentionally structured so one person doesnt solely have power (hence the two leads). If one person ends up messing up theres the other lead and the rest of the admin team to talk with them about it and help them do better in the future.
#2: What happened?
There was a thread in lemmy.ml about the hogwarts legacy game winning a steam award. For reference for the following images + description, snowe is the other lead admin for the instance apart from me and the other people are various other users
There was a conversation that ended up essentially devolving into a slap fight within this post (ive purged the entire conversation so people dont stumble onto it in the future but ill post images here with them for archiving reasons and to explain it)
^ These comments were what initially started it. Essentially it was an argument about the hogwarts legacy game being or being not transphobic
^ Later in the argument
^ One branch that ended up getting started due to the frontend snowe uses on mobile not showing pronouns (how most instances handle it currently is its appended to the end of the display name but some frontends choose to ignore the display name and just do the username instead)
(edit: changed the word triggered to started to make it more clear what definition of triggered I used. Forgot that tends to not be common usage)
There are other branches but it is a very large amount to screenshot and dont want this to completely flood this post. Everything should be available in the modlogs still if you want to dig a bit deeper or I can send other screenshots in the replies on this post if youre interested in what was said for certain parts
#3 Aftermath
Due to the argument above blahaj chose to defederate with programming.dev which was going to take effect 48 hours after their announcement on it. (This is due to the person in the conversation being one of our lead admins which is ultimately understandable as they represent the instance)
snowe has sent a message apologizing to ada (the lead admin for blahaj). I dont know the contents of what was said but if they want the two of them can choose to publicize it.
One of our admins should not have escalated the situation and participated in this slap fight so on behalf of the admin team here were sorry about that
Internally we have a guidebook for admins to follow for the various aspects of the instance (moderation, applications, etc.). Ive refined this guidebook with a couple new rules for admins that should be taking effect in the future
- admins will be required to have two accounts, one for admin activities and one for non admin activities. This is how some admins have already been interacting in the fediverse and basically makes it so comments done on the non-admin account should not be taken as that admin speaking on behalf of the instance. Generally the admin account will be things done relating to admin duties (e.g. my posts here in meta) while the non-admin account is other various conversations. Admins can be as anonymous as they want with the non-admin account similar to how our users here can be as anonymous as they want with their accounts
- im adding in some guidelines for tone while chatting for the admins so comments made that are on behalf of the instance should be respectful and not devolve to slap fights
Like I said before in #2 ive also purged the entire conversation to avoid people stumbling onto it and seeing a slap fight with an admin that has since apologized. As the community exists on lemmy.ml I cant fully do this due to how federation works in lemmy but the mods in the community have been doing the same which should federate.
This should not have happened in the first place and we as an admin team will be better going forward
I hope the blahaj instance sees our actions and chooses to reverse the defederation decision but at the end of the day its their instance and they can choose whoever they want to federate with (note federation is done directionally. I will still leave our direction of federation open)
Edit: Blahaj stopped their defederation (shown in an edit on their announcement) so the two instances will still be federated both directions going forward
Another edit: its a work day, its midnight here, and some comments here are also devolving into slapfights. Ive locked the post since this has already taken up most of my free time to try to handle and moderate this. My dms are always open if you want to dm me regarding the situation
Instances getting de-federated over such trivial things is going to be the death of lemmy.
Nah it’ll just kill Blahaj. Trigger happy instances cause people to leave and join more permissive places, because let’s be real, a user should curate their affiliations and connections, not an admin on their behalf.
I am happy on .ca because I have the freedom to interact with essentially everyone worth interacting with. If it was not the case I may have gone over to .world or any of the other billion awesome instances we have. I could even run my own, if it came down to it.
Man, I wish blahaj would defend from the instance I’m on.
I’ve blocked a ridiculous amount of their meme subs, but there’s nothing to do about their comments.
If there was more of them, then I might consider moving to somewhere they don’t federate with.
Throwing a tantrum because someone is used to nongendered pronouns is just ridiculous.
I use they/them/ya’ll for pretty much everything. There’s very few cases where any type of gendered language is necessary.
We should just move away from it all together.
I just don’t get their logic insisting people use gendered pronouns, it’s not misgendering, it’s just not including unnecessary context.
Edit:
All that being said, I’m not supporting anything related to JKR, never have.
That makes sense, but the slapfight in the screenshots is ridiculous
Edit 2:
And from Blahaj’s post, it looks like the majority of their users are saying defederaion doesn’t make sense either?
Sounds like their admin is just going rouge on their own.
Ada does whatever. They clearly want a walled garden. Let them have it. Who cares, really?
I’m all for supporting trans issues and all but like bro can I not be criticized for enjoying a game from a beloved childhood franchise? You know how many artists are garbage people? It’s just gotten easier to know who sucks because they all get big heads and go on twitter.
It didn’t even look bad tbh. I view it as the admin getting hard baited by a hexbear user. Do take in mind - you aren’t alone in this sentiment. Basically everybody here told our admins it would be a bad idea to defederate.
Any chance you can clarify something? I’m not from either involved instance, obviously, but I’m curious about what some users said about your admins being pro-hexbear. Is there any truth to it?
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I gotcha. It seemed entirely off-base, considering the generally well thought out defederations. This defederation confused me enough to wonder, but I’m happy to be told otherwise. Loathe me some dramabear.
If you haven’t read it, this is JK Rowling’s essay in question.
A lot of people haven’t read the essay that created such controversy.
You should be able to block instances as a user in 0.19.0, I think.
It doesn’t block the users unfortunately, just nukes all the blocked instance’s subs from loading on your feed.
Yeah, but .world has some issues and rolled back.
So we can’t yet.
You’re inventing something to be upset at here.
Using they as a default pronoun for someone you’re interacting with online is fine. Everyone does it. It becomes an issue when that person tells your their pronouns, and you refuse to then acknowledge those pronouns, make excuses for not knowing them, and imply that someone is getting upset over nothing for making an issue of it.
In this case, a Hexbear user clearly baited your admin. But that means he shouldn’t have responded at all, or if he did, it could have been as simple as “noted” to say that he acknowledges the persons pronouns.
The issue here for me isn’t “guess my pronouns or you’re a transphobe”, it’s the disregard for those pronouns once they were clarified.
You can disagree with that if you like, but at least now you won’t be disagreeing with something no one said
No thanks
Imagine my surprise
Ada, you seem to strut around here with an air of importance, and deservedly so, as what you’re doing is great and important. However, you’re also human and make mistakes. You can’t always get it right.
I think this is one of those times.
Despite being fully aware that this admin was a victim of trolling by a chapo, your position is still to blame them? 🤔
I agree. My instance is locally focused so I can just ask rando’s off the street here in Tucson. Turns out people don’t like feeling controlled very much and want to be able to talk to friends that are on other platforms, and that’s why we won’t be defederating from meta/threads.
I have a sense, though, that Blahaj is mostly not real people. Sometimes I wonder how easy it might be to give someone like Ada a false sense of support by loading up the instance with LLM bots that all act like Her. (It’s her, right? God please don’t dox me)
Ive just grown skeptical that people actually operate like this in real life, or rather, enough people to actually matter. And that makes me further question the authenticity of entire instances like Beehaw or Blahaj as “lefty safe spaces”. Seems to me that they function more as a way to provide reasons to dismiss the progressive movement rather than join them.
People definitely act like this on the internet.
The loud people on that part of the internet are by and large the same people who are afraid to ask for more ketchup at a sit-down restaurant.
Beehaw is great, but all I ever see from blahaj users is them stirring up shit
I’ll respectfully disagree if only because I had to nuke my beehaw account because apparently disagreeing that doxing extremists as an effective means of movement building or defense is tantamount to being a transphobe or Nazi sympathizer.
They say “be nice”. But to me it seems like it’s just a type of mean that marginalized folks find acceptable or moral.
My instance is still federated with them. But, I generally don’t participate anymore. Not like I used to.
It’s a shame because in the early days I was helping them out with federation issues and a few other things on their discord. Spent many late nights helping Odo troubleshoot things.
I hope you’re right and I’m just being pessimistic.
I chose mander for the same reason.
It’s not just the trivial things themselves – it’s also the idea that admins will have to police their users for trivial missteps, under threat of defederation, so no one will want to run a server.
I’ve been kind of watching this from the sidelines. Requiring separate admin and general use accounts is definitely a good idea, but it doesn’t absolutely solve the problem of “someone who possesses greater power expressing themselves in confrontational ways.” Once you’re wearing an “admin hat,” you can’t ever really take it off, and you have to know that your actions are always going to be under greater scrutiny, regardless of the user account in question.
However.
I’m a big proponent of “we call people what they want to be called,” but this is the very first time I have ever heard that using generic pronouns is somehow consciously offensive. I get that if Party A has made undeniably clear what pronouns they use, and Party B insists on using generic pronouns, yeah, that could be an action consciously intended to offend or put down - but I also think that it’s not necessarily and always that way. Context matters, and the context in this particular incident suggests (to me, at least) that transphobia has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Language is an ever changing thing, although it may change more slowly than desired. When you’re talking about extremely foundational bits of language - like pronouns - it takes a huge amount of effort (especially for older people, of which I am one) to get your brain to change gears and use the words and thoughts that you want to. I know this from personal experience. When I am talking to or about a person in my own family, who I have known since his birth 18+ years ago, it is extremely difficult to adjust to a “new paradigm,” even when “new” means “several years in the making.” I suspect that I will always have to make conscious efforts to think and speak in ways that I want to, and that I won’t always get it right. Just because I don’t always get it right doesn’t make me a transphobe.
Forklift that situation over to text on a screen with someone who is essentially anonymous to me, with whom I may never have interacted with before, it’s highly likely that I’m going to get it wrong even if I try. Then, if I use the generic pronoun “they” in order to avoid misgendering someone, and I get smacked down for that? That’s just plain unreasonable, and I have no interest interacting with anyone who would throw shade for that reason.
For blahaj to threaten defederating with an entire instance over just that is completely unreasonable. Maybe that threat was taken based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the facts. Maybe there are facts that I don’t know. What I do know is that just because someone uses strong language to disagree with someone else doesn’t mean there’s any bigotry at play.
Just to make we fully exhume the original argument – I hang out with a lot of trans and nb people and I’ve noticed people just saying “they” to everyone, and I kinda love it. If everyone’s just they then no one needs pronouns. The first part of the long term mission, to destabilize gender completely, starts with shit like that - taking all gender out of language.
For the first paragraph: year fair. I’ll likely do some more additions to our admin guidelines for expected conduct on non admin accounts and I can do a general expected conduct when participating in the instance (for all instance users) for behaviors that anyone shouldn’t do regardless of whether they’re an admin or not. Can add that to the support site im making
Most of the pronoun situation just stems from discrepancies in different frontends where the “main” frontend shows it but most people are on mobile apps that don’t show it leading to people assuming visibility when that isnt the case. In your second paragraph people who don’t realize the discrepancy in these frontends may think they’re making it clear as you say
But yeah overall things in the conversation wasnt done maliciously and was able to be resolved fine
There was some other branches other than the pronoun situation although that was one of the main ones pointed out to me for defederation reasons
I honestly admire the transparency of the updates on the p.d meta community. Thanks for sharing the background, despite the situation not being ideal
From the screenshots, it looks like snowe wasn’t being aggressive at all. And getting hate for using “they” is excessive. It’s a shorter way of saying “that person”. Blahaj (a blue shark from IKEA? I don’t get it) shouldn’t be this touchy about stuff. It’s like a C programmer getting offended about being called a programmer.
I’m in agreement here, and given Blahaj’s trigger-happy nature when it comes to defederation, I’m not sure I care all that much.
I’ve seen them defederate so many other instances for “wrong-think” and I don’t think Snowe should feel like he’s in the wrong here.
It’s only a matter of time before they defederate from my own instance, tucson.social, because I don’t think 100% like them. I apparently support trans genocide because… checks notes… I don’t think that doxxing far right reactionaries/extremists is an effective tactic for garnering sympathy and building a movement.
Yup, that’s it. Apparently that opinion makes you a Nazi sympathizer in these circles.
I haven’t been outted as a wrong thinker yet, but I did have a conversation with another Jew (I’m a Jew for context) and apparently I’m wrong for not thinking the goblins from Harry Potter are antisemitic.
I caught that. This whole thing is absolutely childish and ridiculous.
I will call out that the initial commentor was kind enough to edit their message when I asked they they let a Jew call out antisemitism or not
The IKEA shark is a mascot/icon for LGBTQ+ spawned from memes.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-ikea-shark-became-trans-icon-1753400Thanks. That seems so random 😅
Shit I default to they usually until I get corrected
It’s more inclusive than just making assumptions plus working in a customer facing position I got in the habit of gender neutral terms and holiday agnostic seasonal greetings
Exactly. I barely look at usernames, because they are not worth remembering. “they” is my default.
Off topic question though, why do you have a creative commons link in your comments?
As someone who does a lot of 3D printing and modeling I’m pretty familiar with the “Attribution, non-commercial, share-alike” one but I’ve never seen someone tag all their comments as it before
Snowe even proved they can’t see the pronouns. Seems like the other person chose to continue to be mad for no reason.
it looks like snowe wasn’t being aggressive at all
name-calling is universally considered to be aggressive. “ignorant troll” definitely counts
And getting hate for using “they” is excessive.
it is an extremely common transphobic tactic to de-gender people whose pronouns are easily visible as a plausibly deniable way of attacking them. considering all of us have our pronouns in our names on hexbear, we’re going to assume that anyone 'they’ing us is doing it on purpose, which is an entirely reasonable assumption.
and all this argument started because this admin wanted to defend the latest shovelware trash game by the dev of Cars 3: Driven to Win, which is about putting down the revolt of the race of greedy hook-nosed bankers in a setting written by one of the world’s most open and notorious transphobes
in short: nah this sucks and defederation from queer instances makes sense
Here’s how your comment appears in Boost via programming.dev. No pronouns visible.
If you’re going to participate outside your own instance, you have to accept that others don’t see your instance’s unique changes.
That much is fine. But a normal person would stop at that and apologize and move on, not double down on it by going “getting offended by that really isn’t helping your case here.”
An admin being like this is understandably a very bad look for the instance.
Yeah, this whole argument seems to be about assuming a bunch of hostility because someone was unaware of things they had no reason to be aware of.
If you’re going to participate using third-party apps that remove basic lemmy features, you have to accept that people will be confused by your ignorance of those features. Pronouns are not a “unique change” by Hexbear, here’s what my comment looks like via programming.dev without a third party app
Lemmy is not the only “player” on the fediverse.
Kbin doesnt show pronouns either. That or I cant find it.I agree with the others that the admin shouldn’t have doubled down, but as someone using kbin.social via my phone’s browser I don’t see pronouns either.
This conflict is actually the first time that I became aware that some instances show pronouns, which I love. But that being said, as an enby I tend to default to they/them pronouns when dealing with the unknown, so I get it.
it takes 10 seconds tops to check the profile.
Oh wait, a hexbear user.
And you call us the trolls.
legitimately, yes, i do, to make sure i am gendering them correctly. especially if i had a client that didn’t display pronouns.
most people don’t. and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect them to.
you don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to check somebody’s profile for literally less than 10 fucking seconds to make sure they aren’t made really uncomfortable? really?
To everyone attempting to reply to the above comment in good faith, remember that the only way to productively engage with a hexbear is to not engage at all. Trying to do so is what started this whole kerfuffle in the first place.
Don’t feed the trolls.
Edit: Note the bait below, and note how I’m not wasting my time engaging with it.
you’re the one poisoning the well, how is that not troll-adjacent at best?
If you want people to reply to you in good faith you have to engage in good faith. If you’re going to make passive-aggressive comments like this, don’t be surprised when we make fun of you for it.
Edit: Note the bait below, and note how I’m not wasting my time engaging with it.
Making smarmy little edits such as this is, in fact, engaging.
I’ll never get over the fact that the sheer reality of our existence has melted some people’s brains because they can’t prove us wrong about anything, we’re truly the spectre haunting online libs
Same. Block and move on.
Getting twisted about gender neutral language as a tool of oppression is dumb as hell. I consider gender neutral language to be preferable and more egalitarian and wish English would just drop gendered pronouns like Persian did and like we dropped gendered nouns compared to most other Indo European languages. I find this nonsense position to be oppressive myself.
Edit: As an aside, originally our mother language for indo-european speakers actually had to do with whether something had a spirit or not, not its gender as we understand it now. Then it switched to male and female instead of soul or no soul as religious concepts evolved. There’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same as our concepts around gender continue to evolve.
It’s two things, really; a hexbear user baiting someone to say something controversial, and Ada and Katy making the wrong decision, because they’re human after all.
Maybe they had a reason to believe snowe was a bad actor due to something they said. Shit happens when you’re in a bad internet argument. At the end of the day, at least everything got sorted out.
I think it would be reasonable to defederate from blahaj.zone. A majority of the toxic, negative, and aggressive comments I see on Lemmy seem to come from users of either blahaj or hexbear. The admin very intentionally curates a cult-like community by posting provocative posts and then banning everyone who expresses even slight disagreement. They have engaged in and doubled down on false accusations of CP against the lemmynsfw admins, which demonstrates that they are a risk for other instances be federated with. I normally very strongly oppose dedederation, but I think blahaj is a great example of when it makes sense. This is because the admin seems intent on starting drama rather than working with other instances to resolve conflict. It almost feels like some form of religious extremism lol
I of course block the instance from my account to avoid seeing posts from there, but toxic users are still visible on comments.
The team is fairly unison in wanting to avoid defederation as much as possible and leave it users to filter out content they personally don’t enjoy. Programming is a big and diverse field, and we want to make it as open as possible to everyone. Unless the instance breaks our own rules as described in the sidebar under “federation rules”, I feel like it would be an overreach by us to defederate an instance due to personal opinion.
That’s definitely fair. You’re a far more patient person than I would be, which makes me feel good about being on this instance.
For what it’s worth, HB and Blahaj mostly hate each other, too.
Idk, often when I see someone with pronouns in the username I hover over the name to check the instance, and normally if they’re being an asshole in the comment it’s hexbear and if they’re being nice and reasonable it’s blahaj, so to me it doesn’t seem quite the same.
Personally, I can speak on behalf of blahaj. They’re not bad, they’re just…strict in their judgement. Hexbear, on the other hand, is literally just a combination of the bad parts of 4chan and Twitter.
Not to mention Hexbear literally has a community dedicated to organizing brigades on what they see as problematic posts and comments
Hexbear is hella bad to the point where I won’t join an instance if they’re federated with them (why I’m not using a programming.dev account right now)
(Hopefully me commenting here (in a meta post) from another instance isn’t a problem but if it is I’ll happily delete this comment. I didn’t want to make a top level comment because, well, meta post)
Anyone’s free to comment here. Meta decisions apply to any users of the instance regardless of where your account is hosted
Hexbear we are federated with but its a half federation where a bunch of their communities have been hidden by default in all of the feeds (including the community youre referring to). Usually things are fine with them interacting in the threads here locally and we haven’t had any issues due to it being a specific niche
(Theres out of instance stuff but that should be up to that instance to handle them)
Also going to try to get a better instance block in at some point that allows people to block users if they want that level of control rather than just the communities. Just want these sorts of things to be determinable at the user level rather than instance level defederations since ultimately things are mostly fine
Eh, best to not get into a pissing contest when you don’t have to. We need instance blocking to optionally affect comments as well as posts and then instances can stick to only defederating the worst of the worst (illegal, spam, or troll instances).
I generally agree they’re very dramatic but defederation isn’t necessary. If you’d like you can block it at a user level, there’s no reason for bad blood between instances and users getting caught in the crossfire.
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That instance is quite liberal (heh) with its defederation so this isn’t entirely unusual.
Tbh though this one makes more sense than the other instances they’ve defederated given that theirs is centered around trying to be trans-positive.
Even weirder how they defederated Hexbear then though; that conversation is with Hexbear users who they clearly agree with.
Even weirder how they defederated Hexbear then though; that conversation is with Hexbear users who they clearly agree with.
They are friendly to chasers and really heckin’ mad about tankies, so they won’t get along with HB even if both parties rightfully hate Rowling.
Hexbear defederated blahaj first if I remember right
Nah they defeded us. IIRC it was over drama with chasers and vaushites in /c/196.
There were a bunch of defederations around that time, but I think blahaj was on their side. Granted, whoever did it it was a mutual feeling.
Did it? Blahaj doesn’t seem to be in our blocked instances list
Hexbear uses a whitelist so they have to be on the allowed instances list.
What does the “linked instances” do then? Blahaj is on it.
No idea lol. As far as I know it’s a default part of lemmy and the default defed is by blacklist.
Federation is wild
No offence, but I will never be confused by anyone’s decision to defederate with Hexbear.
This is so stupid lmao
How do I always miss the drama on this instance? Moments like this make me realize I’m not as terminally online as I thought.
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And not transphobic.
Context matters. I only say this because a bad faith actor could say “they/them is not transphobic” as a justification to deliberately ignore someone’s preferred pronouns. It isn’t what happened in this case, and I’m not suggesting that’s your intent.
I’m glad everything worked out in the end. I hope snowe learned a couple of lessons from this. One about how to interact and respect the lived experiences of marginalized peoples, but also a lesson about not engaging with hexbear trolls in the first place.
respect marginalized people!
by calling them all trolls
dog come the fuck on, how do you get this close and then shit the bed so hard
We’re in your walls code monkey
This is so dumb you should defed with Blahaj in principle. I don’t even use this instance but it’s kinda pathetic that you guys have to deal with this.
Apparently defending oneself from attacks in a discussion is “aggression”. No consequences for the others in that thread I assume.
It’s also completely insane that the use of “they” to refer to anyone would be soft transphobia. That’s one of the main purposes of that word - especially on the internet. Some languages don’t even have he/she it’s literally just THEY in their language e.g Tagalog has ‘sila’ for singular ‘they’ and ‘sha’ for plural they. There is no he/him/her/she in that language.
This is so dumb you should defed with Blahaj in principle.
Fucksake. Can we please stop escalating petty grievances to instance-wide disruptions? It shouldn’t even be on a hypothetical table.
The conversation was in English, though. I’m sympathetic to your argument – if we all spoke Lojban, as we ought to, then pronouns would be computable from display names and nouns would be non-gendered; however, when speaking English, please be aware of the centuries of colonialism baked into the linguistics.
Yeah sure like blacklist instead of exclusion list. I get it. Really I do. I feel like saying you’re progressive instantly means you aren’t - so I still won’t say it.
They/them is a way to refer to anyone without making ANY assumptions about gender - because it’s entirely unnecessary to do so. I don’t see how calling someone who identifies as female ‘they’ has any affect on someone who is transgendered or specifically prefers they/them identifiers. It sounds like the intent there is that they/them is exclusive for transgender…which as of this time I can’t agree with.
If it’s done intentionally to disparage trans allies then sure - that makes good sense - but this clearly wasn’t done in bad faith.
Ex-list and inc-list are a lot more intuitive too.
Dumb. You ban users and defederate for poor moderation. Granted, folks can run their instance into the ground however they want.
I’m surprised mods and admins don’t have the option to choose not to distinguish their posts and comments.
There is a distinguish option that adds a shield but its a bit redundant since it marks you with the flairs anyways
Only way to really get around it for now is the multiple accounts
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