As posted about recently in [email protected] and [email protected] it seems that @[email protected]’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).
Other reasons here as well to consider defederation
Isn’t lemmy already?
Yep, bad views don’t just stop at one particular thing. Flagship instances often go this way sadly, and thus should be defederated from unless they significantly improve.
Lemmy.today maybe too
Lemmy.today has already been defederated from blahaj.zone because they had some nasty spam and transphobia problems.
Is this guy even real? lmao at this point he might as well admit to being a christo-facist
They’re doing what many TERFs do, trying to cover up their bigotry with politeness and trying to sound like it’s about logic or discussing the meaning of things. Trying to make their transphobia seem acceptable. Then they say trans people are unreasonable when they get called out or banned for their bigotry.
Well terfs are definitely nazis
deleted by creator
Did you contact their mods or admins? They should have an opportunity to administer appropriate action first. Then, if they are ok with this bullshit, de-fed.
Meanwhile, may I endorse a cool shirt that people might want to wear this summer:
That is their admin, and also one of the lead developers of Lemmy.
The other comment that identified them as an admin disappointed me but this one makes me sad.
Nutomic is one of the head admins on Lemmy.ml, there are others as well but he’s one of the two in charge of the whole place.
Well, in that case, fuck 'em.
I’m not on my blahaj account, but I can copy/paste there if you’d prefer. Just seemed pointless when I use the same user name to switch over.
But I’m mainly giving some background to the whole matter, rather than primarily “voting” about defederation.
It’s interesting that nutomic wants to get all het up after asking for donations to lemmy development.
That’s largely why they’ve been so active in comments lately. They can’t seem to keep from expecting people to pay them as individuals the develop lemmy, while also not being willing to at least be clear about where they stand.
And that’s what the donation requests are about. They’re not bringing in enough to develop full time. And that’s an important thing, having full time developers on a project like this. What they don’t seem to get is that they’re not just asking us to pay for full time developers, they’re asking us to pay them. They aren’t figureheads or managers, so it isn’t some kind of collective where you can point to other members of the dev team and say “well, maybe those two are unpleasant, but at least the rest aren’t bigoted”
Which, afaik, dessalines has never publicly been bigoted. He can be a smug asshole sometimes, but so can I, so there’s only so much complaining I can do there. But nutomic is a different issue, and this screen shot perfectly encapsulates how.
Donations would go into both of their pockets for their work, and they do deserve to be paid for that. Even jerks get to make a living. But we all get the choice as to whether or not we’re a customer or not. Me? My double digit yearly open source budget is going to people that at least have the sense to have never shot their mouths off with bigoted bullshit. Lemmy is an amazing thing, and the world needs it. I just can’t directly support a bigot. I can’t, and won’t do it.
I wouldn’t hire on someone to fix my roof if they had a damn maga hat on, why would I give money to someone that is not only just as much of a bigot, but is also hyper authoritarian? I know hiring someone vs contributing to a project isn’t a 1:1 equivalency, but the principle is.
Donations to then also fund .ml. And if anyone wants to donate like that, it’s none of my business. It’s just important that it be known that you can’t donate granularly. You donate, .ml gets some operating costs covered, dessalines gets a chunk, and nutomic gets a chunk.
And that’s where this comes from. The discussion in the screen shot is fallout from that. Nutomic still holds the same views they always have, but wants people to ignore that when donating. Which is fine!
As far as defederation goes, all I can say is that, while I have had unpleasant runins with both of them, I’ve never been permanently banned from .ml, or any of its communities. Individual communities there can, and do, enforce anti-bigotry rules with no interference from admins. But, there are no specific instance rules regarding transphobia in particular.
Again, this is pretty much just added background for anyone that hasn’t the time to go digging for the context of the screen shots.
What statement about transgender people are we talking about?
Sigh, if you must know, here is the context:
CW: Transphobic talking points
I thought more people had seen this since it’s older and pinned in MeanwhileOnGrad.
This is baffling. How can you be so bad at communism that you think trans rights are something the bourgeoisie are pushing
Yeah. All transphobe considerations apart (and that’s something!), this is a terrible “marxist” take.
allowing biological men to compete
I don’t go to this school, but this line seems irredeemably constructed.
Defederate, and I would have said the same if you asked me yesterday.
I don’t think anything significant would be lost by dumping ml. two years ago sure, the platform was too small but now ml is just annoying. I don’t know how the governance of that sever is set up. but if nutomic has control of the domain, its more a question of when will he decide to change ml rules. I trust ada to make the call when federation with ml becomes a problem. guess i’m just chiming in to reaffirm that for when the time comes. don’t know how lemmy as a platform grows long term if nutomic retains any level of control over it. but i’ll probably just be following you fuckin weirdos onto the next platform so it’s not that big a deal. maybe it could be a nostalgic return to internet forums.
Nutomic doesn’t really mod .ml much anymore.
his current mod practices are not my point. and he’s already banned from here, nutomic isnt a problem here for us in this moment. but if he retains control of the ml server/domain in some way. his responses to db0 definitely show him obsfuscating, not being naive or uninformed. when the blowback from his own statements causes him to drop the mask full-time. ml rules could become whatever he decides and the mod team becomes whatever he needs to enforce that. if the ml server governance is designed in a way to protect against that, great! the odds of it going fully hostile are lower.
lemmy devs being bigoted it’s more likely than it think
i really wish there was a valid lemmy alternative software or wish postmill implemented atproto or ap :(
yea let’s defederate.
somthin somthin terf-tankie-whatevr… somthin along those lines… i dun evn kno whad those words mean
- TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (transphobia)
- Tankie = Apologists for outright oppressive, murderous regimes like Putin’s Russia and North Korea
Yes. There should be no handwringing over this. If admins/mods for an instance are bigoted, fash, or other such things then they deserve to get defederated as they will allow many bad things and spread their hate. It is best to isolate them as they want to spread their hate and convert more people, that’s their entire goal.
I personally blocked ml a long time ago and my experience is much better for it. Their moderation and userbase leave much to be desired. As far as nutomic, I would say it seems like hes not a good person from what I know, and especially this post.
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.
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.
Good, as I suspected world users are… Well they’re world users
I never really liked his ideas, trans-related or not, but why the hell was he saying all of that just for a (presumably) message about a Firefox plugin???
