Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.
Basic synopsis on my feelings here:
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tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.
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I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.
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I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.
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The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.
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Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @[email protected], @[email protected] (an admin), @[email protected]. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.
I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.
I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards 
I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.
He said
I didn't start a fight. I said my piece, and someone came out of the woodwork to debate me. I would like to point out that I was one of many posters that said it was a good idea, and that user chose me, a trans person, to reply to. It is not a good idea to debate someone on their personal experiences of harassment, and removing a potential vector for harassment is good. Another unfun fact, is that this is recurring behavior with this user, where they 'debate' a trans person, make them angry, and demand they be civil. The trans person then gets banned. I'm currently investigating further instances of this, some of which are from other trans hexbear users and even mods of /c/traa.
The issue is the admin backed up the person doing this bad and transphobic behavior.
So, I tried bringing this up with my gf and she got kinda angry and doesnt seem to have much patience for your perspective. She thinks you're ignoring the importance of dialectics and shouldnt have stepped in with your opinion if you weren't prepared to defend it.
I dont want this to turn this into a proxy fight though (which I'm way to susceptible too) and she doesnt want to hear anymore about this anyway and dont feel comfortable stating opinions from my own angle because it feels like talking over so I'm just going to step out. This isnt a disengage you can still reply I just. Idk I feel very uncomfortable about this and I'm upset both that you're upset and my gf is upset so I need to step back and should probably not have gotten involved.
Yeah, the thing is, this kind of harassment has happened at least three times so far. I care more about the trans community than some weird ass transphobia-adjacent admins on an even more niche communist website than hexbear. One big issue with the trans community online right now is that its all on corporate media despite so many of us being socialists. Trans people are more likely to be hyper-online due to how society treats us. This corporate ownership of our spaces leads to unrelenting harassment campaigns against trans people, because it drums up engagement. I don't want to be advocating for people to come here and then they get harassed by some transphobic idiots who somehow got to be mods from lemmygrad. Banning the instigators doesn't do, they're mods and admins. So they need to recognize the problem or get fucked.
Going to reply against my better judgement. I am deeply empathically upset that you are upset, but also deeply empathically uspet that my girlfriend is lol, like I said.
I just think you're being myopic. You've decided, based on lived experience to be fair, that banning downvotes is always better for trans users. And you're stretching people disagreeing with you on that, far beyond the realm of a reasonable response to being disagreed with on something. Like my girlfriend said, if you step into someone else's community to tell them how they should run it, which even CARACOSA agrees we shouldnt have been doing in the first place, then you better be willing to discourse about it. Thinking you get to just say what you feel and then not get any pushback on the issue doesn't make any sense. As someone in there said, its not like you're debating the right of trans people to exist or something where a harsh response to someone disagreeing is actually warranted. You're debating downvotes. I get that our mutual experience as Hexbears have shown us that no downvotes is better for our community, and agree with that. But treating people disagreeing with that as being transphobic or something is a huge reach. Especially when the experience of some of their trans users runs counter to that.
I've got at least one lemmygrad trans person telling me she disagrees that it would work for lemmygrad, and basically thinks you should stay in your lane. She says the queer specific communities there do not have the problems ours did. Is it so hard to believe that different communities evolved differently?
I also disagree with you that being able to have polite conversations with comrades (not liberals, as you've written them off as for reasons I dont understand) is "civility fetishism". Hexbear has rules about being nice to other members of this community too. Check how many times a comment has been removed for being hostile.
Downvotes are a vector of harassment, I gotta tell you, your girlfriend is just factually wrong. If something can be used to harass, it will at some point.
I absolutely will step in and tell communities to stop being transphobic and remove vectors of harassment against trans people. Fuck anyone that has a problem with that. If they can come up with a better system, I'm all ears.
This is becoming a debate, and I'm uninterested in debating something so obvious.
If I'm myopic, you're blind. I regularly go through Hexbear's ban log and rectify situations involving trans users. None of it comes close to this bullshit that I'm looking into right now.
While we're bringing up grievances about site culture, have I mentioned that I find that your and much of the site's attitude about "debate bros" actually stigmatizes the way many autistic people communicate to the point of making it a banable offence? Like the fact that you think that you can just step in, state your opinion, and not get pushback because its "obvious" (its not obvious to everyone, and im not talking about only cis people) and anyone who disagrees with you is just a debate bro is incredibly problematic for ND users. So perhaps your social justice highhorse on this issue isnt actually as high as you thought?
Social justice high horse? We talking like reactionaries now?
Have you considered that I am tired of debating what harassment is and justifying it to (especially) men? No? Because almost all the people fucking with me on this have been men.
OK see? I used a term in a way that made sense to me and you're calling it reactionairy. I pointed out a problem with your rhetoric from a social justice angle and you didnt even comment on it in your response, just tried to pick a problem with my language. Guess you dont care.
And well, my girlfriend isnt a man, and I'm 90% just voicing her opinions for her, and neither is the enby hexbear user who I spoke to who didnt feel like fighting but agrees with everything that Ive said. I think you're just refusing to acknowledge that lemmygrad has NOT experienced the "downvotes as harassment" problem that this community did and therefore doesn't see the need to adopt our policies. And the trans users there seem compeletly comfortable with that.
You're relaying stuff. No need to get involved, tell them to speak with me. Bye.