fediverse

i don't understand. just don't go to lemmygrad, stay on hexbear? am i missing something?

Fully agree on all points, federation was a mistake.

I looked at the source argument. My initial instinct was that maud_dibber, the admin you had a problem with, was not being expressly transphobic or even debatelordy and was coming at you in good faith. Since I'm cis, I didnt want to come at you with that perspective at first, but I ran it by my trans gf and she said she agreed with me. Thats one personal obviously, but full disclosure this girlfriend is a lemmygrad user who will remain anonymous. Maybe its worth considering that trans users of lemmygrad dont feel unsafe with the downvote feature in place like you do? And that its just a difference in culture?

civility reasons

Lemmy.ml was extremely keen on civility bullshit too until they realised it was completely untenable.

When a marginalised person gets upset at a dickhead for marginalising them and you then utilise "civility" rules against that marginalised person, you are directly taking part in performing an action that marginalises them. You are an oppressor, siding with other oppressors.

It took some time to get that through to dessalines but I eventually cracked them and their modteam, I actively had to take up a deliberately combative stance and walk the line between daring them to ban me vs contributing in such a way that I was a person people did not want to ban due to making quality points. Hopefully this will get through to the lemmygrad team too.

i agree that we should defederate. this shit is annoying and it is absolutely not hard to just have 2 accounts on 2 separate sites you wanna use

I agree that the responses you got in that thread were reddit tier bullshit.

That said, I don't think federation should be considered endorsement of an instance and likewise defederation shouldn't be treated as condemnation. Personally the value I see in federation is growing Hexbear, people who came to lemmy though other instances will see how we run things and some people will want to be a part of that. We won't get access to other safe spaces through federation because there aren't any others. (De)federation isn't a useful tool to attempt to change other instances either, they have decided what type of places they want to be and the leverage provided by federation is almost non-existent.

As far as I'm concerned, we can look at federation from a pragmatic perspective: if the trouble caused by another instance is enough to outweigh the possibility of bringing new converts it should be de-feded, otherwise we should stay federated. The other option would be to just dump federation entirely, as any instance that does not take creating a safe space as seriously as we do is detrimental to our ability to do so.

We need to get to solving the root cause of the problems.

First, OP is correct and we should defederate. The excuses given by the mods over there simply don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Second, even defederation doesn’t solve the problem. The core issue beneath this entire debacle is how do we moderate reactionary contents especially those that are hurtful to minorities on our sites.

Over there, someone proposed removing the downvote button because they suspected users from fash instances were mass downvoting their contents.

Over here, we have long eliminated the downvote button, but this is merely kicking the can down the road: just the other day, someone complained about why anti-semitic comments were allowed to stay up (i.e. not deleted, nobody reported to the mod team) and why were there users upvoting those comments?

Worse, it unnecessarily burdens the mod team and especially during high traffic period, with thousands of comments per day during the Israel-Gaza conflict, it is inevitable that some comments will be missed.

The real solution to the core issue (as I have also pointed out to them at the Lemmygrad thread), is to enable the feature that displays the users who did the upvotes and the downvotes. This solves both issues at once: who downvoted trans/LGBT content? Who upvoted anti-semitic comments? Everything is on full display and transparent, and everyone is fully accountable for their voting records. If you’re too ashamed to have your opinions on record, good, maybe you should think twice about why you’re feeling ashamed about pressing that up/downvote button in the first place.

It also shifts the burden of moderation away from the mod team to the community itself. We know this feature exists because the admin has banned someone before based on their mass downvote history of trans posts before. What needs to be done is to democratize this tool so the community has access to it as well.

Personally, I also like to see who upvote my comments (I will call you my comrades!) and who downvote them (look, a lib/chud) and I’m sure other users will benefit from it as well.