Instance admin updates + Blahaj

Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Ategon@programming.dev⁩ to ⁨meta@programming.dev⁩

Hey everyone. Some of you may have seen the recent announcement with blahaj to defederate with the instance. Ive been handling things privately and wanted to do an announcement to catch you all up on the results of that

#1: Background knowledge

Realized that not everyone knows how the instance is structured so figured I would do a little section in the front to go over that (especially for visitors reading this from other instances)

We currently have 8 admins in the instance. Of those 2 people are currently lead admins (snowe and I). Majority of admins are part of the community team but not all of them (people are split between infrastructure, development, and community). I was planning out a team page similar to what lemmy.world has to go over this with a bit more detail and that should be coming in the future. Main thing though is its intentionally structured so one person doesnt solely have power (hence the two leads). If one person ends up messing up theres the other lead and the rest of the admin team to talk with them about it and help them do better in the future.

#2: What happened?

There was a thread in lemmy.ml about the hogwarts legacy game winning a steam award. For reference for the following images + description, snowe is the other lead admin for the instance apart from me and the other people are various other users

There was a conversation that ended up essentially devolving into a slap fight within this post (ive purged the entire conversation so people dont stumble onto it in the future but ill post images here with them for archiving reasons and to explain it)

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^ These comments were what initially started it. Essentially it was an argument about the hogwarts legacy game being or being not transphobic

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^ Later in the argument

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^ One branch that ended up getting triggered due to the frontend snowe uses on mobile not showing pronouns (how most instances handle it currently is its appended to the end of the display name but some frontends choose to ignore the display name and just do the username instead)

There are other branches but it is a very large amount to screenshot and dont want this to completely flood this post. Everything should be available in the modlogs still if you want to dig a bit deeper or I can send other screenshots in the replies on this post if youre interested in what was said for certain parts

#3 Aftermath

Due to the argument above blahaj chose to defederate with programming.dev which was going to take effect 48 hours after their announcement on it. (This is due to the person in the conversation being one of our lead admins which is ultimately understandable as they represent the instance)

snowe has sent a message apologizing to ada (the lead admin for blahaj). I dont know the contents of what was said but if they want the two of them can choose to publicize it.

One of our admins should not have escalated the situation and participated in this slap fight so on behalf of the admin team here were sorry about that

Internally we have a guidebook for admins to follow for the various aspects of the instance (moderation, applications, etc.). Ive refined this guidebook with a couple new rules for admins that should be taking effect in the future

admins will be required to have two accounts, one for admin activities and one for non admin activities. This is how some admins have already been interacting in the fediverse and basically makes it so comments done on the non-admin account should not be taken as that admin speaking on behalf of the instance. Generally the admin account will be things done relating to admin duties (e.g. my posts here in meta) while the non-admin account is other various conversations. Admins can be as anonymous as they want with the non-admin account similar to how our users here can be as anonymous as they want with their accounts
im adding in some guidelines for tone while chatting for the admins so comments made that are on behalf of the instance should be respectful and not devolve to slap fights

Like I said before in #2 ive also purged the entire conversation to avoid people stumbling onto it and seeing a slap fight with an admin that has since apologized. As the community exists on lemmy.ml I cant fully do this due to how federation works in lemmy but the mods in the community have been doing the same which should federate.

This should not have happened in the first place and we as an admin team will be better going forward

I hope the blahaj instance sees our actions and chooses to reverse the defederation decision but at the end of the day its their instance and they can choose whoever they want to federate with (note federation is done directionally. I will still leave our direction of federation open)

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Comments

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RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Instances getting de-federated over such trivial things is going to be the death of lemmy.

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- canis_majoris@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Nah it’ll just kill Blahaj. Trigger happy instances cause people to leave and join more permissive places, because let’s be real, a user should curate their affiliations and connections, not an admin on their behalf.
  
  I am happy on .ca because I have the freedom to interact with essentially everyone worth interacting with. If it was not the case I may have gone over to .world or any of the other billion awesome instances we have. I could even run my own, if it came down to it.
  
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  - givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Man, I wish blahaj would defend from the instance I’m on.
    
    I’ve blocked a ridiculous amount of their meme subs, but there’s nothing to do about their comments.
    
    If there was more of them, then I might consider moving to somewhere they don’t federate with.
    
    Throwing a tantrum because someone is used to nongendered pronouns is just ridiculous.
    
    I use they/them/ya’ll for pretty much everything. There’s very few cases where any type of gendered language is necessary.
    
    We should just move away from it all together.
    
    I just don’t get their logic insisting people use gendered pronouns, it’s not misgendering, it’s just not including unnecessary context.
    
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  - RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I hope you’re right and I’m just being pessimistic.
    
    I chose mander for the same reason.
    
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- jeremyparker@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s not just the trivial things themselves – it’s also the idea that admins will have to police their users for trivial missteps, under threat of defederation, so no one will want to run a server.
  
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Nougat@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I've been kind of watching this from the sidelines. Requiring separate admin and general use accounts is definitely a good idea, but it doesn't absolutely solve the problem of "someone who possesses greater power expressing themselves in confrontational ways." Once you're wearing an "admin hat," you can't ever really take it off, and you have to know that your actions are always going to be under greater scrutiny, regardless of the user account in question.

However.

I'm a big proponent of "we call people what they want to be called," but this is the very first time I have ever heard that using generic pronouns is somehow consciously offensive. I get that if Party A has made undeniably clear what pronouns they use, and Party B insists on using generic pronouns, yeah, that could be an action consciously intended to offend or put down - but I also think that it's not necessarily and always that way. Context matters, and the context in this particular incident suggests (to me, at least) that transphobia has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Language is an ever changing thing, although it may change more slowly than desired. When you're talking about extremely foundational bits of language - like pronouns - it takes a huge amount of effort (especially for older people, of which I am one) to get your brain to change gears and use the words and thoughts that you want to. I know this from personal experience. When I am talking to or about a person in my own family, who I have known since his birth 18+ years ago, it is extremely difficult to adjust to a "new paradigm," even when "new" means "several years in the making." I suspect that I will always have to make conscious efforts to think and speak in ways that I want to, and that I won't always get it right. Just because I don't always get it right doesn't make me a transphobe.

Forklift that situation over to text on a screen with someone who is essentially anonymous to me, with whom I may never have interacted with before, it's highly likely that I'm going to get it wrong even if I try. Then, if I use the generic pronoun "they" in order to avoid misgendering someone, and I get smacked down for that? That's just plain unreasonable, and I have no interest interacting with anyone who would throw shade for that reason.

For blahaj to threaten defederating with an entire instance over just that is completely unreasonable. Maybe that threat was taken based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the facts. Maybe there are facts that I don't know. What I do know is that just because someone uses strong language to disagree with someone else doesn't mean there's any bigotry at play.

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- jeremyparker@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just to make we fully exhume the original argument – I hang out with a lot of trans and nb people and I’ve noticed people just saying “they” to everyone, and I kinda love it. If everyone’s just they then no one needs pronouns. The first part of the long term mission, to destabilize gender completely, starts with shit like that - taking all gender out of language.
  
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- Ategon@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  For the first paragraph: year fair. I’ll likely do some more additions to our admin guidelines for expected conduct on non admin accounts and I can do a general expected conduct when participating in the instance (for all instance users) for behaviors that anyone shouldn’t do regardless of whether they’re an admin or not. Can add that to the support site im making
  
  Most of the pronoun situation just stems from discrepancies in different frontends where the “main” frontend shows it but most people are on mobile apps that don’t show it leading to people assuming visibility when that isnt the case. In your second paragraph people who don’t realize the discrepancy in these frontends may think they’re making it clear as you say
  
  But yeah overall things in the conversation wasnt done maliciously and was able to be resolved fine
  
  There was some other branches other than the pronoun situation although that was one of the main ones pointed out to me for defederation reasons
  
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lemann@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I honestly admire the transparency of the updates on the p.d meta community. Thanks for sharing the background, despite the situation not being ideal

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onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
From the screenshots, it looks like snowe wasn’t being aggressive at all. And getting hate for using “they” is excessive. It’s a shorter way of saying “that person”. Blahaj (a blue shark from IKEA? I don’t get it) shouldn’t be this touchy about stuff. It’s like a C programmer getting offended about being called a programmer.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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- booty@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  it looks like snowe wasn’t being aggressive at all
  
  name-calling is universally considered to be aggressive. “ignorant troll” definitely counts
  
  And getting hate for using “they” is excessive.
  
  it is an extremely common transphobic tactic to de-gender people whose pronouns are easily visible as a plausibly deniable way of attacking them. considering all of us have our pronouns in our names on hexbear, we’re going to assume that anyone 'they’ing us is doing it on purpose, which is an entirely reasonable assumption.
  
  and all this argument started because this admin wanted to defend the latest shovelware trash game by the dev of Cars 3: Driven to Win, which is about putting down the revolt of the race of greedy hook-nosed bankers in a setting written by one of the world’s most open and notorious transphobes
  
  in short: nah this sucks and defederation from queer instances makes sense
  
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  - SheeEttin@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Here’s how your comment appears in Boost via programming.dev. No pronouns visible.
    
    If you’re going to participate outside your own instance, you have to accept that others don’t see your instance’s unique changes.
    
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  - hakase@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    To everyone attempting to reply to the above comment in good faith, remember that the only way to productively engage with a hexbear is to not engage at all.
    
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  - roguetrick@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Getting twisted about gender neutral language as a tool of oppression is dumb as hell. I consider gender neutral language to be preferable and more egalitarian and wish English would just drop gendered pronouns like Persian did and like we dropped gendered nouns compared to most other proto-Indo European languages. I find this nonsense position to be oppressive myself.
    
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- towerful@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The IKEA shark is a mascot/icon for LGBTQ+ spawned from memes.
  newsweek.com/how-ikea-shark-became-trans-icon-175…
  
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  - onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thanks. That seems so random 😅
    
    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
    
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- Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Shit I default to they usually until I get corrected
  
  It’s more inclusive than just making assumptions plus working in a customer facing position I got in the habit of gender neutral terms and holiday agnostic seasonal greetings
  
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  - onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Exactly. I don’t barely look at usernames, because they are not worth remembering. “they” is my default.
    
    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
    
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- lukini@beehaw.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Snowe even proved they can’t see the pronouns. Seems like the other person chose to continue to be mad for no reason.
  
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- Meganium97@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s two things, really; a hexbear user baiting someone to say something controversial, and Ada and Katy making the wrong decision, because they’re human after all.
  
  Maybe they had a reason to believe snowe was a bad actor due to something they said. Shit happens when you’re in a bad internet argument. At the end of the day, at least everything got sorted out.
  
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Supermariofan67@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think it would be reasonable to defederate from blahaj.zone. A majority of the toxic, negative, and aggressive comments I see on Lemmy seem to come from users of either blahaj or hexbear. The admin very intentionally curates a cult-like community by posting provocative posts and then banning everyone who expresses even slight disagreement. They have engaged in and doubled down on false accusations of CP against the lemmynsfw admins, which demonstrates that they are a risk for other instances be federated with. I normally very strongly oppose dedederation, but I think blahaj is a great example of when it makes sense. This is because the admin seems intent on starting drama rather than working with other instances to resolve conflict. It almost feels like some form of religious extremism lol

I of course block the instance from my account to avoid seeing posts from there, but toxic users are still visible on comments.

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- UlrikHD@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The team is fairly unison in wanting to avoid defederation as much as possible and leave it users to filter out content they personally don’t enjoy. Programming is a big and diverse field, and we want to make it as open as possible to everyone. Unless the instance breaks our own rules as described in the sidebar under “federation rules”, I feel like it would be an overreach by us to defederate an instance due to personal opinion.
  
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  - Supermariofan67@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s definitely fair. You’re a far more patient person than I would be, which makes me feel good about being on this instance.
    
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- GarbageShoot@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  For what it’s worth, HB and Blahaj mostly hate each other, too.
  
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- Meganium97@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Personally, I can speak on behalf of blahaj. They’re not bad, they’re just…strict in their judgement. Hexbear, on the other hand, is literally just a combination of the bad parts of 4chan and Twitter.
  
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  - Gormadt@slrpnk.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Not to mention Hexbear literally has a community dedicated to organizing brigades on what they see as problematic posts and comments
    
    Hexbear is hella bad to the point where I won’t join an instance if they’re federated with them (why I’m not using a programming.dev account right now)
    
    (Hopefully me commenting here (in a meta post) from another instance isn’t a problem but if it is I’ll happily delete this comment. I didn’t want to make a top level comment because, well, meta post)
    
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- chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Idk, whenever I see someone with pronouns in the username I hover over the name to check the instance, and normally if they’re being an asshole in the comment it’s hexbear and if they’re being nice and reasonable it’s blahaj, so to me it doesn’t seem quite the same.
  
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- popcar2@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I generally agree they’re very dramatic but defederation isn’t necessary. If you’d like you can block it at a user level, there’s no reason for bad blood between instances and users getting caught in the crossfire.
  
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- IronKrill@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Eh, best to not get into a pissing contest when you don’t have to. We need instance blocking to optionally affect comments as well as posts and then instances can stick to only defederating the worst of the worst (illegal, spam, or troll instances).
  
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Album@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is so dumb you should defed with Blahaj in principle. I don’t even use this instance but it’s kinda pathetic that you guys have to deal with this.

Apparently defending oneself from attacks in a discussion is “aggression”. No consequences for the others in that thread I assume.

It’s also completely insane that the use of “they” to refer to anyone would be soft transphobia. That’s one of the main purposes of that word - especially on the internet. Some languages don’t even have he/she it’s literally just THEY in their language e.g Tagalog has ‘sila’ for singular ‘they’ and ‘sha’ for plural they. There is no he/him/her/she in that language.

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- kogasa@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  This is so dumb you should defed with Blahaj in principle.
  
  Fucksake. Can we please stop escalating petty grievances to instance-wide disruptions? It shouldn’t even be on a hypothetical table.
  
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- Corbin@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The conversation was in English, though. I’m sympathetic to your argument – if we all spoke Lojban, as we ought to, then pronouns would be computable from display names and nouns would be non-gendered; however, when speaking English, please be aware of the centuries of colonialism baked into the linguistics.
  
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  - Album@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah sure like blacklist instead of exclusion list. I get it. Really I do. I feel like saying you’re progressive instantly means you aren’t - so I still won’t say it.
    
    They/them is a way to refer to anyone without making ANY assumptions about gender - because it’s entirely unnecessary to do so. I don’t see how calling someone who identifies as female ‘they’ has any affect on someone who is transgendered or specifically prefers they/them identifiers. It sounds like the intent there is that they/them is exclusive for transgender…which as of this time I can’t agree with.
    
    If it’s done intentionally to disparage trans allies then sure - that makes good sense - but this clearly wasn’t done in bad faith.
    
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Aquilae@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That instance is quite liberal (heh) with its defederation so this isn’t entirely unusual.

Tbh though this one makes more sense than the other instance they’ve defederated given that theirs is centered around trying to be trans-positive.

Even weirder how they defederated Hexbear then though; that conversation is with Hexbear users who they clearly agree with.

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- Wisp@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hexbear defederated blahaj first if I remember right
  
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  - barrbaric@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Nah they defeded us. IIRC it was over drama with chasers and vaushites in /c/196.
    
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  - GarbageShoot@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There were a bunch of defederations around that time, but I think blahaj was on their side. Granted, whoever did it it was a mutual feeling.
    
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  - Aquilae@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Did it? Blahaj doesn’t seem to be in our blocked instances list
    
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- sab@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No offence, but I will never be confused by anyone's decision to defederate with Hexbear.
  
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- GarbageShoot@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Even weirder how they defederated Hexbear then though; that conversation is with Hexbear users who they clearly agree with.
  
  They are friendly to chasers and really heckin’ mad about tankies, so they won’t get along with HB even if both parties rightfully hate Rowling.
  
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h3mlocke@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is all pretty silly, but ngl snowe seems like a fucking douche lmao

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elint@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m glad everything worked out in the end. I hope snowe learned a couple of lessons from this. One about how to interact and respect the lived experiences of marginalized peoples, but also a lesson about not engaging with hexbear trolls in the first place.

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- Kuori@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  respect marginalized people!
  
  by calling them all trolls
  
  dog come the fuck on, how do you get this close and then shit the bed so hard
  
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- ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  We’re in your walls
  
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spacecowboy@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is so stupid lmao

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Deceptichum@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wow this Kuori person is a massive idiot. They to refer to a 3rd party is basic English.

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- spacecowboy@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And not transphobic.
  
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  - kogasa@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Context matters. I only say this because a bad faith actor could say “they/them is not transphobic” as a justification to deliberately ignore someone’s preferred pronouns. It isn’t what happened in this case, and I’m not suggesting that’s your intent.
    
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roguetrick@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Dumb. You ban users and defederate for poor moderation. Granted, folks can run their instance into the ground however they want.

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SheeEttin@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m surprised mods and admins don’t have the option to choose not to distinguish their posts and comments.

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- Ategon@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There is a distinguish option that adds a shield but its a bit redundant since it marks you with the flairs anyways
  
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mriormro@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Are you guys in fucking high school? Do we seriously lack the emotional intelligence to regulate our reactions?

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- Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wow a place literally created to get away from transphobia doesn’t like it when you’re transphobic!! Spoken like someone who would be genuinely offended at being called a cracker.
  
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Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Me reading comments and reminding myself why I quit the field. I swear half the industry are like one bad day away from going full nazi.

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