Just starting another discussion (sorry tom!), about the gender community we have. gender@feddit.uk
The sub sidebar states that it is designed for balanced debate. It links to a gender-critical and anti-lgbt locations, while also linking to blahaj, and referring to beehaw as a hugbox.
@babe made a post the other day raising concerns with the posts arriving on the sub, and the mods locked it.
There are cross-posts from a community named parental-rights, a common dogwhistle for people wanting to block minor access to trans healthcare, and users posting about how trans healthcare is a conspiracy by the medical industry.
Someone affected directly by the issues being raised isn’t going to want to stick around and argue with someone who thinks they shouldn’t exist.
They’re more likely to write off the whole server, and leave.
It’s still early days on this instance, but imho this is not a good look for us.
Okay I’ve given this some thought to this and I agree with most of the comments here that mention this is troubling.
Firstly I wanna preface with saying I’ve never moderated anything before so this is new to me so I’ve generally leaned to being more hands off. Saying that I’m gonna look to add extra site admins in the near future who may know more about moderating.
Back to the point, I think the comment @SaltMeadow@feddit.uk made was a great point, in that, I don’t think the community’s idea explicitly breaks the instance rules. But the posts and some of the posters are on the edge/ if not breaking the instance rules so I’m going to remove the community in question to stop it attracting more users who will break the instance rules
Also this instance is supposed to be UK centric, so I think it’s fair to leave communities that are more controversial to other instances who are better equipped to deal with them
With this I’m going to post some more community creation guidelines tomorrow which will give more explicit guidance on which communities are allowed on this instance. I’m leaning towards having political communities requiring approval before being created to avoid this in the future
TLDR: You have to decide early where your limits are or you’ll be overrun before you can react.
https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280891537451343873
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
It was eye-opening. I was very happy I was there to witness/get the explanation.
The uniqueness of the fediverse is that anyone can create their own instance, but that doesn’t mean you have to federate with their instance. Or that you should let anyone start a community on YOUR instance. You are ultimately responsible for your instance. It is, in my opinion, a failing of ActivityPub that foreign (not from the instance) content is (seems to be) copied to the displaying instance. Talk your way out of “my users where just federating boogey man/3d gun parts/child pornography content to my instance/server”.
YMMV
To be clear the mods locked it in under 2 minutes of it being posted with no comment or message.
My two DM attempts over the past few days to raise this issue with Tom, the admin of Feddit.uk instance as a whole have so far received no response.
I’m currently holding off on raising the Fediblock flag on this to escalate it to a larger issue in need of attention to the wider fediverse, as im hoping this is growing pains and time to adjust, and because i really would love to see the wider Feddit project succeed with instances flourishing but the actions of the lead moderator of Gender are clearly only looking to reinforce their own anti-trans stance which contravenes the rules of this entire instance which specifically state “No Transphobia” but as of yet the instance admin doesnt seem to be interested in enforcing that and that brings the federated safety and reputation of this place into doubt. If the instance was a mastodon instance it would already be fully defederated from by the wider fediverse.
I have raised this before, the fediverse is heavily trans lead, the ActivityPub code its built on was programmed by a trans woman, many moderators and admins of instances are trans, and the community doesnt approach “Transphobia” as negotiable or a debate in the manner that places like twitter and reddit or the UK media or Government promote for financial or political gain from rage engagement and “culture war”.
The lead mod has since started posting in the anti-lgbtq instance anti-trans articles, after going on bended knee asking them as “an anti-lgbtq instance” to come and join in his community here which lead to them starting to post articles from a self identifying far right ‘finance and news’ website as well as videos mocking trans existence.
I’m truly sorry you’ve had this experience here. I saw your post and I saw how quickly it got locked. I also saw how you handled the situation in the other thread where they debated with you back and forth. I won’t pretend to be hugely knowledgable regarding the issues that the trans community face and that is on me, I need to educate myself. I just want to add that I think Tom may be on holiday at present and it might be that he isn’t sure how to respond to you. However, that’s not an excuse and I do think that the community should have been locked down at the very least. It’s unfortunate timing that an instance was created, it’s grown extremely quickly in numbers, and the lead admin is not able to give full attention to pressing issues like this. I hope a resolution can be reached soon.
Just checked it out and agree, that is the beginnings of a harmful community. It doesn’t look too active yet so it would be a good idea to nip it in the bud now, if that’s what is decided.
IMO communities like that rarely bring the crowd you would want to hang out with.
@tom@feddit.uk def seems this community is breaking the instance rules?