cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/12273255
I've only been on Lemmy a few days and I've already witnessed a lot of thinly veiled transphobia, anything from people dismissing the existence of trans people, to trying to claim we are predators. I've also seen people downvoted in the general communities for expressing trans support, or seemingly for no reason other than simply being openly trans or visibly queer. I know it's an ongoing effort to moderate transphobia on Lemmy, and the fediverse as a whole. We have to also address mentions of thinly veiled transphobia and transphobic users. Transphobia isn't just a differing opinion, it is a dangerous hateful sentiment which causes harm to vulnerable people and it needs to be addressed, at the instance and community level. We need to put in the effort to identify transphobic dogwhistles and language used by transphobes to eradicate this type of behavior from our communities and servers alike.
Some people will argue that the light stuff isn't something to worry about, but that's not true. This is a tactic they use to blend in with normies and make them think that nothing they are doing or saying is wrong. It's what transphobic right-wing YouTubers and Facebook users do to avoid being banned for hate speech. We are better than these corporations though, Fediverse is run by communities and for the users, we should not let these things slide as easily as Corporations do, they're in it to make money, we... We're in it to create a community for the users. Part of that means kicking out those who don't have all our best interests at heart.
The fediverse isn’t one thing and lemmy in particular is censorship proof, meaning there isn’t much you can do besides tailoring your own experience and filtering the feed to suit you. My instance doesn’t federate with lemmy.world or lemmy.ca because they are not well run instances without any oversight to their users and it’s mostly spam. My instance also fully disables downvotes because they are all spam as well.
Admins indeed can deal with these users, by deleting their content from their instances, and banning them from the site, if they are homed on that specific instance they get banned everywhere when that happens. So it can be dealt with but it takes work from our admins, and since these are communities run by real people and not monolithic corporations, we can speak up and make a difference. Reach out to these admins who are real people.
Admins can, I do on vegantheoryclub.org but lemmy.world and lemmy.ca will not. The admins don’t agree with your take and aren’t going to change their minds so the only recourse you actually have is to invest in and build your own server and federate with who you align with.
Any specific issues with Lemmy.ca? The admins always seemed quite reactive and reasonable
They allow drama and harassment communities to be hosted on their instance.
Ah, I guess you're referring to !fediverselore@lemmy.ca
Yeah, leaving something like that on their server demonstrates a lack of vision and maturity. If they are going to host a major instance they should be more careful about allowing toxic communities to use their facilities.
There is some value in such meta communities. On the other hand, they indeed require extra attention.
I very strongly disagree and defederate their server and their spam users for that reason. That only exists to harass and troll people and should not be tolerated. After some shitbag posted about me there I had waves of trolls go to my discord servers. The posts there are all extremely petty and it should be deleted.
Sorry to hear, I see where you come from.
On the other hand, being able to call out power tripping admins and mods is valuable. I guess maybe today !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com is better for that purpose
We don’t need people calling anyone out, we need people to invest in new instances and actually post content. Lemmy is censorship proof so nothing is being accomplished with this nonsense that is worth while. Even the idea that people are power tripping, just block them. It is their server they’re paying for, don’t use it or federate them. All this does is create drama and harass instance admins or in the case of lemmy.ca harasses regular users and makes this overall less enjoyable. It’s a toxic and immature behavior that is best left on Reddit.
I've had mods power tripping, preventing me from contributing to a community I had contributed building. Just mods, not admins.
On top of that, if an admin thinks that they are all powerful on their instances, it's their right, but then make it clear so that most of the people can move their communities elsewhere.
And has your call outs and drama ever worked? No. It never works. You still had to do what did work. All that was produced was more toxic and counterproductive bullshit.
What would work is moving to a different instance with a different identity or better yet launching your own instance.
The problem with mods and admins is that the ownership isn’t widely distributed across the users enabling that dynamic in the first place. This is non commercial human scale social media which means that it is run by people. If you don’t like it or them you must run your own.
Put up or shut up
Oh, it did. A few of us were unhappy with that mod, we launched our own community, which is now far more active that theirs.
For admins, it's a different story, I agree with you, if you don't like the admin, just change instances. But for mods, it's a different story.
Not really, I come across posts from your instance sometimes and I downvote because I disagree. Though now I know that was futile.
This is why downvotes are mostly spam lmao. They have more to do with how popular something this than the substance of the post. It is also impossible to distinguish good faith criticism and reactionary suppression.