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.
Of course the transphobe threads are on the UK instance, lmao
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
This is troubling. If other instances decide to defederate this one due to the actions of this community, it affects the reach of every other community on here.
If that happens I will be forced to move my communities elsewhere, and I’m sure other communities would do the same.
Thank you for making this post. I saw it happen and found it very concerning. I didn’t feel capable to address it myself so I am very glad someone else has raised the issue. I would like to hope that the vast majority (should be everyone but evidently not with what’s happened) of our instance will be in agreeance that transphobia is absolutely not something we want to be associated with here. @tom@feddit.uk Please deal with this.
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