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Moderator banned from their own community for practicing harassment (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/fediverselore@lemmy.ca
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Its a shame because they're prominent voice on lemmy. Good on the admins for not tolerating this. I don't understand the point of targeting a person you don't like on the internet just because they said something that upset you and spamming their post with downvotes. If you don't like someone block their ass and be done with it. I agree with the perspective that its harassment (and an incredibly petty ineffective form of it at that)

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[–] 9 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Blahaj policy is very explicitly that it's a safe space, and transphobia and transphobia-adjacent content (and other forms of bigotry) will be removed. It's supposed to be somewhere people can go and have it taken as axiomatic that their neopronouns are valid, and therefore they won't have to debate them, so while it's pretty reasonable to say that you'd prefer people grew to be happy with they and neopronouns didn't become a permanent feature of English because they're awkward, it's not Blahaj-friendly, so can't be said on Blahaj, especially if you're going to repeat it a lot.

It's perfectly reasonable for people to like crisps, but it doesn't mean I have to let people keep adding them to my cake when I'm trying to eat cake.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Yes. That's one of the problems with the "I am lord and master of this domain, and all will obey me and my nutty definitions of words like 'transphobia' into some wild alternate reality" model. Human interaction doesn't need to work that way, even if it gets more comfortable when you're aligned with the lord and master to do it that way.

    Personally I think that two things are going on here: One, the whole Lemmy model where people are divided into the lords who must be obeyed no matter how arbitrary their rules, and the people who must obey, breeds and normalizes some toxic models of interaction. And, two, basically 100% of Lemmy is already queer-friendly and trans-friendly, and so an instance that wants to "stand out" as a particularly queer-friendly instance has to keep ratcheting up the level of overt queer-friendliness of the rules of their instance until they're again in a position of giving other people a hard time for not being queer-friendly enough. And so the inevitable conclusion is that the rules have to include things like "dragon is a gender!" and "questioning certain things I say is transphobia even when it's not!"

    Like I say, in my opinion, the whole thing is fuckin' ridiculous. I have heard the same from queer people who have been drummed out of blahaj for exactly the same reasons (basically, having and stating opinions that aren't the official lord-and-master opinion.) In my opinion that makes for a bad model for an instance. It's got nothing to do with the identity of the people who are making the rules that way for the instance, it has to do with the nature of the interactions that it causes.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    It's a feature, not a bug, at least when they're upfront about it. With non-federated platforms, you're still subject to the domain's lord and master, but you can't pick who that is or maintain access to your communities if you upset them.

    While Blahaj isn't the right instance for me, it's no problem that it exists side by side with other instances, and people who want to use social media with no risk of running into things they're already fed up with can have a place for that. If you get banned from somewhere, it's because it wasn't the right fit for you, and nothing's stopping you from finding or making a place that is. It's not like the has to be only one 196, it's just that the one where all the cool people are is the one where everyone agrees to give everyone the benefit of the doubt on all things gender and sexuality.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    You act like the majority of us on Blahaj don't agree with these policies. Like it's a dictatorship that we're being subjected to against our will. Queer, and trans, people aren't one homogenous block of opinions, there are going to be plenty of disagreements and that's okay. Blahaj just isn't for them, like Blair White wouldn't fit in either and Blahaj is better off for that.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Fair enough, but it's just not impacting blahaj users. It's not like a private forum on a server somewhere. You're participating in a big intertwined network, but then reserving the right to run some sections of it according to these super-strict (and to me pretty arbitrary) rules, and so you're winding up with a situation where blahaj people can talk to off-blahaj people, on some blahaj community, and some off-blahaj person can see it and respond reasonably and then get attacked, falsely accused of being transphobic, and then have it escalate into this thing where (for example, in this exact post) they're getting kicked off being allowed to run their own forums on some whole different instance, because now they're officially "bad" with the way they violated the dictates of the blahaj lords as part of the evidence.

    If blahaj was its own private area, then sure. "Only come here if you're okay with the rules." That makes sense. But they're participating in a shared network, storing their messages on other people's servers, having posts replicated into random other sections for random people to see them, but then retreating to the "but this part of the space is MINE!" standpoint when anyone tries to raise any kind of objection to how they set up the rules for it. And also leveling this bigotry accusation if anyone doesn't obey how they want the interaction to go.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    This is the exact nature of decentralised networks though. It's a tacit agreement of "you follow my rules when you're commenting on my instance and I follow your rules when I comment on your instance". It's a shared attempt at civility, and if that breaks down, defederation is only a few clicks away. We've never had direct control over other instances, so we've defederated them when that civility has broken down, and other instances have the exact same right to do the same with us. The Blahaj admins are paying hundreds of dollars, usually out of their own pocket, per month to run the instance. I think they get to dictate what goes on in the spaces they run. It's not like other spaces, like lemmy.world, don't have their own unpopular rules, like their heavy-handedness with "advocating violence".

    The reason PJ gets called a bigot, is because he dramatically said in that original Blahaj meta thread that he was leaving the instance for good, but then has spent the last 6-9 months going around to every space he can, dragging the Blahaj admins through the mud and loudly proclaiming "dragons aren't real" like it's some self-evident revelation that proves how smart he is. Drag wasn't even a fucking dragon, they were a dragon fucker! It was literally drag's username for fluffs sake. It's not Blahaj's fault that other instance admins have gotten sick of his whiny, self-aggrandising bullcrap. Drag was literally banned from Blahaj not long after that thread, trans people just don't believe respecting pronouns are a cookie you get for being one of the good ones... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think we're probably just not going to see eye to eye on this. I specifically didn't want to get dragged into this whole tarpit of tribal bitterness, but then I waded into it deliberately on purpose, so that's on me I guess.

    I actually wrote and then just deleted some stuff, because what's the point. I feel like I've said what I had to say on it and you have a differing point of view. All good. I'll leave only the thing I think gets to the heart of it:

    If blahaj admins would just be straight-up about it, and say "Listen. This dragon person is clearly a troll, and we're banning them for that reason, but we don't want to allow people to decide pronouns on a case-by-case basis. In this case, the rule produces a stupid result, but that's the rule we settled on and we have good reasons not to bend it in any circumstance or have to have long debates about this stuff every week, so please respect it or we will ban you," I don't think there would be any kind of issue. That's a decent and human-to-human way of defining the interaction that gets across the point and still respects their good reasons for the rule. To me (and maybe you may disagree with this), it seemed like instead of that they said "HOW DARE YOU MISGENDER THIS PERSON YOU TRANSPHOBIA ADJACENT BIGOT" and then went on to (as in the current post) continue to whine about how horrible it was that anyone was trying to point out that (a) the user in question was clearly a transphobic troll (b) going to bat for them was ridiculous. And, they constantly talk about how those people were wrong, and bigoted, and shouldn't be talking that way even off the blahaj instance.

    That's my take on it, I don't think I want to go back and forth about it much much more, you're welcome to the final word if you like.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Is this comment by ada, the admin of blahaj, in this very thread, not more similar to your first example than your second one?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The absolutely constant use of the terminology of "misgendering," "gatekeeping other people's identities," "causing deliberate harm," and things like that, as opposed to "yes you have a point and you don't seem to be intending harm BUT..." is what makes it different. You can look around the thread and see some examples.

    Like I say, I think we're just not going to see eye to eye on it, which is okay.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    We pawbably aren't going to see eye to eye, but my last point is that most trans folks, myself and Ada included, have dealt with this stuff again, and again, and again. After dozens of times you just kind of don't have the energy to be forgiving while discussing it. Especially with someone like PJ who pretty loudly was a bit of an ass about things. That's pawbably not ideal, but it is what it is.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    That's one of the problems with the "I am lord and master of this domain, and all will obey me and my nutty definitions of words like 'transphobia' into some wild alternate reality" model.

    Ah yes, defining what is and what isn't transphobic to a bunch of trans people. Always a good look. I look forward to your panel on teaching black people what is and what isn't racist next.

    This is literally how Reddit works. There are ground rules that Reddit made, and the mods for each subreddit are free to make their own on top of that and enforce them as they please. If you want some open floor of debate, Twitter is right there. Blahaj was made by trans people, for trans people. You are in our home by our grace, like a straight man at a lesbian bar. You can't be surprised when the owners take umbrage with you repeatedly coming in and trying to debate "what is and isn't homophobic" with the lesbians. And this isn't some crazy demand - it's literally just asking you to call people what they want to be referred to by. I shudder to think how you handle nicknames when Frederick wants to go by Rick instead of Fred. Regardless of how silly you or I may think "drag" is as a pronoun, you still should refer to drag as such because it's simply basic human decency. Respecting people isn't some reward you can dole out to the worthy like a lord in his fiefdom.

    And the reason that Lemmy seems so queer-friendly is because of the constant battle of the mods and admins across the instances to keep it that way. There are right-wing chud instances out there that you and I have never seen because the rest of Lemmy refuses to federate with them.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Blahaj policy is very explicitly that it’s a safe space, and transphobia and transphobia-adjacent content (and other forms of bigotry) will be removed. It’s supposed to be somewhere people can go and have it taken as axiomatic that their neopronouns are valid, and therefore they won’t have to debate them, so while it’s pretty reasonable to say that you’d prefer people grew to be happy with they and neopronouns didn’t become a permanent feature of English because they’re awkward, it’s not Blahaj-friendly, so can’t be said on Blahaj, especially if you’re going to repeat it a lot.

    But not only did I explicitly say that I was willing to use neopronouns, but my ban from Blahaj was over something said OFF of Blahaj entirely, long after I stopped using Blahaj. Namely, I said that I didn't believe that dragons were real, and for that reason, Ada was summoned, and thought that was a great reason to instance ban someone who hadn't even used Blahaj in months.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Yeah. The whole thing is stupid. I'm moderately confident that this is either:

    1. People ganging up as a very organized effort to try to bully you out of the space as they did FlyingSquid, when you (I think with every righteous reason) decide this bullshit is unpleasant and unfair and you don't feel like putting up with it anymore. I've already semi-abandoned the political spaces on lemmy.world, not even because I was getting bullied with any level of success, but just because the overall flavor of the interaction is so toxic and fact-free.
    2. People who are just operating on pure tribalism. It's fine for them to accuse you of all kinds of stuff you objectively didn't do, call you a twat and a loser, all kinds of stuff. It's not fair for you to argue about politics or downvote people, those are evidence of toxicity and sins. Because they're on the "right" team and you're on the "neoliberal enemy" team, so they can do what they want, you can't. Reminiscent of a popular political viewpoint in the US...

    Honestly, I wouldn't even stress about it. I get the impulse to try to defend yourself vigorously from this stuff but they're not going to listen to anything sensible anyway, and they'll be able to cherry pick instances of you getting upset to use later as proof that you're some kind of monster. If you want my advice about how to look at it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Oh, I figure they're not going to listen. But I have the urge to at least put a defense of myself out in public. I have a great many flaws as it is; I'll good goddamned if I let people attribute made-up ones to me without at least being disputed.

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