As posted about recently in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca it seems that @nutomic@lemmy.ml’s stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don’t think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it’s open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it’s very likely they won’t have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can’t speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn’t inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven’t seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don’t want to see that, don’t open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I’d really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj’s local community on this, I’m not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren’t from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
he regularly bans people for calling .ml users out on their denial of the Uyghur genocide. he was just one stone throw away from also denying the trans genocide.
this is why authoritarians should never get the benefit of the doubt, they’ll never stick with just one dangerous belief.
Personally, I don’t think his shitty views necessarily translate into .ml moderation policy and action, which to me would be the problem that defederation is meant to solve.
That said, I wouldn’t mind defed-ing from them in general, as most of my unpleasant interactions in the fediverse have been with .ml users.
Ultimately, I’ll back Ada on what she thinks and decides. She’s very level headed and strict with other instances as far as blahaj zones mission statement is concerned, and I trust her completely.
Personally, I have a very poor opinion of nutomic. And yes, he has always been/felt transphobic. He has a history of making massive oversteps to attack people that have differing opinions to his, and overall I believe him to be a threat to the trans community. As for whether we should defederate? I really have no clue. It certainly isn’t a bastion for blatant transphobia, and hosts many of the top Lemmy communities, and a very large amount of the active Lemmy userbase. I think the effects of defederation would be immense, and take a lot of time and consideration to understand if it’s overall beneficial to the community. That being said, I’m sure I could be swayed to support either side. I’d be very curious what Ada has to say about this, as I believe I’ll support her opinion on the matter.
EDIT: I think it’s valuable to point out that any individual user can block an instance in their settings. So regardless of any defederation decision (which Ada seems opposed to), anyone can choose to block the instance themselves.
That is partially why I opened this thread. A community discussion is something that could be beneficial here in deciding what to do. There could be a lot of fallout from defederation though I don’t feel like it would be particularly bad since most communities on Lemmy.ml are already a thing elsewhere, and have more users there too, and most people who want to be here already have accounts here or would very quickly and easily make accounts here or on an instance that federates with us.
Multiple states: “Let’s literally use the force of law to ban trans people from existing.”
This jackoff: “Hmmm, I just don’t know if the bourgeoisie is really against trans rights! It’s so hard to tell!”
I’m not going to weigh in on the defederation issue. I don’t use enough .ml communities to know how this guy’s views reflect in the moderation policies of the instance. But fuck him in particular.
I swear I’ve seen this exact comment in a similar thread some time ago. I think your take is flawed or even disingenuous. We all know that trans issues are manufactured outrage. Which is what nutomic appears to be saying.
This whole controversy with him reeks of comment baiting and using an off the cuff comment in order to undermine the Lemmy project. It’s no coincidence that this thread came up right after the devs say that they are running out of funding.
Why is it suddenly time to defederate with ml when this happened months ago.? The only real negative thing he said is about trans sports, but honestly I don’t think the lgbtq community gave a hot damn about highschool and college women’s sports before.
Admin Ping for @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone to weigh in on this issue with her thoughts and opinions on the matter.
Nutomic was banned from this instance approximately 9 months ago when I first become aware of his stance. However, it’s not something I plan on defederating over unless it becomes clear that the instance as a whole is not acting on transphobic content or unless it becomes clear that the community strongly believes that we should defederate.
Yeah that’s why I decided to make the thread sooner rather than later. I wanted to get the community’s opinions on it and see what they think. I do think there is the risk of Nutomic and others refusing to action transphobic rhetoric similar to his own if it seems “respectful” and “logical”.
If that starts happening, we will defederate. But he doesn’t seem to be standing in the way of the rest of the instance staff from dealing with it as far as I can tell.
It’s the first time I see the transphobic original message, and honestly I’m not surprised to see it within ML community. In general, they and the ideology is already rather cultish given their beliefs and the shunning of “wrongthink”, but there’s a smaller subsection of ML’s who genuinely believe in this kind of reactionary chauvinism that’s a complete bastardization of Marxism.
There’s probably no one on this specific community who goes “hmm maybe there’s some merit to that statement”, but in case there is:
Trans people exist, and much like proletarians, their experience is shaped by our society and material conditions. They suffer through medical gatekeeping, discrimination and state violence among other things, all of them stemming from structures of capitalist domination, and just because occasionally some bourgeoisie opportunistically exploit these issues to garner support/profit from rainbow capitalism and the like, doesn’t mean you should go full reactionary.
I keep hearing people say that beehaw is filled with reactionaries, does that hold any merit?
First time I’m hearing of that but no, it’s mostly liberal progressive types here.
Good, as I suspected world users are… Well they’re world users
Liberals, sure.
Progressives?
You can get away with all kind of reactionary nonsense as long as you’re polite about your bigotry and run around JAQing off.
I saw this earlier in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and it’s pretty bad. I’m in favor of defederation, at the very least to help cut some of .ml’s network effect on the Fediverse. Since many of their communities are insanely large and they’re also very well known for banning people for let’s just say less than justified reasons. Nutomic’s transphobia is really the last straw in my opinion. If people are interested in looking for alternative to popular .ml communities, !de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone is a good place to look.
I don’t think anyone needs to stop using or break away from Lemmy like people say. Lemmy is open-source and can easily be forked. Lemmy’s devs don’t have the authority to deny people from using Lemmy either. Instances operate independent of them, and since many instances are already here and using Lemmy, switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.
I agree with you but I do want to clarify this point.
switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.
Since Lemmy uses the underlying ActivityPub protocol you can use something completely different and it is compatible. For example in response to this latest drama with Lemmy devs I switched to fedia.io, which is running on Mbin and not Lemmy. Mbin is compatible with Lemmy because Mbin also uses ActivityPub. The compatibility happens on a protocol level not the service level. You can go search up Mbin magazines (which is essentially the same thing as a community) and interact with the same way as you would with a Lemmy community. You can’t set up a community on an Mastodon instance because it doesn’t have that functionality but you can theoretically comment in Lemmy and Mbin communities thanks to the ActivityPub. You can also use Piefed as it fills the same social media niche. The platforms that are incompatible would be platforms that are not using ActivityPub.
Instance owners can’t just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it’s not that simple. But for the average user you can create an Mbin account and as long as the instance is federated with all the instances your Lemmy account was then you can subscribe to all the community you were subscribed to before and the only functional difference in your daily usage is the sorting algorithm (. For instance owners the only possible solution may to be have a migratory period where you have two instances running, so people could slowly transition from one instance to another but looking at how hard it was to get people to move from Reddit I think moving instances is a whole other topic.
I’m not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won’t be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.
Instance owners can’t just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it’s not that simple.
That was really my whole point, since the databases aren’t compatible. A switch from Lemmy to something else would reboot the instance completely. But also it’s not necessary for instances that aren’t lemmy.ml. Maybe some instances out there are loyal to .ml but that doesn’t mean all of them are. This one certainly isn’t and neither is my main one dbzer0.
I’m not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won’t be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.
That’s good, I see a surprising amount of people saying that users and instance owners should switch to piefed or mbin over this as a form of “boycott” which I think is dumb because we don’t have any onligation to give money to the devs, to support them, or even to federate with them. This instance banned nutomic for his transphobic rhetoric, and quokk.au defederates all of .ml as a whole.
