This post is “FYI only” for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the “adult human female” dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and “civil disagreement” on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
it’s .ml ofc
Is that a known problem instance?
Disclaimer: long-time member of lemmy.ml
It’s not really a problem instance for most people, and it’s a pretty diverse one as far as explicitly leftist communities go. It’s the original instance created by the original Lemmy devs, who are openly Marxist-Leninist communists. That’s a big part of how Lemmy has generally remained anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, why it’s not covered with ads and awards and karma gamification and all that junk.
Until the relatively-recent reddit API exodus, the biggest instances were lemmy.ml (general purpose for FOSS tech and left-wing, with all kinds of socialists present), Lemmygrad.ml (Marxist-Leninist-only), and Hexbear.net (dirtbag left). Lemmygrad got a negative reputation among a lot of ex-redditors because of their overall campist, anti-Western positions and critical support of traditional enemies of the US, while Hexbear joined federation later, had built a culture of crass trolling methods to keep visiting conservatives and other capitalists away, and surprised everyone by how large they were, creating an illusion of brigading whenever a post was big enough to get to their front page and gain a sudden influx of Hexbear users mocking them. All three of these communities also had a strict interpretation of anti-bigotry and anti-chauvinism, to the point where echoing a pretty common (albeit unknowingly racist) black-and-white American understanding of countries like Russia and China could be enough to get a ban, leading people used to a pro-Western media bubble to just dismiss these instances as being intolerant echo chambers who ban people for disagreeing, when they were really getting banned for unintentionally and unknowingly being bigoted or spreading misinformation. Hexbear and Lemmygrad have been defederated by a few instances.
Hence, the other reply, just saying “tankies” (a perjorative that can mean basically anything these days).
Woah I didn’t know tankie was a pejorative. I thought it was just a cheeky but cute (and honestly kind of charming) way to refer to auth left political philosophy.
Yeah it obviously depends on context, many do say it cheekily and others (like your friend, I’m guessing?) take the charge of militancy in stride, lemmygrad even have a tank in their logo as a reference, but it’s originally meant to accuse someone of advocating authoritarian military violence, and there’s a scattering of people using it that way on Lemmy, some going as far as calling tankies “right-wing”. I mean, the left-right spectrum is a flawed model, “left” and “right” are ultimately vibes, but even then that’s just getting silly.
tankies