Just a sense check here, are you asserting that Ada is a PTB for defederating from feddit.uk after their admins failed to take action?

Blajah Zone is specifically run as a safe space for trans folks, so it's an emphatic YDI to feddit.uk from me.

Given that the UK Supreme Court recently ruled that the legal definition of a woman in the UK is based on biological sex, and the supposedly Labour PM Starmer is running with it (wtf Starmer???), it's not surprising to me that TERFs and their supporters are coming out of the woodwork on feddit.uk.

Fuck TERFs and fuck Starmer for jumping on Trump's anti-DEI bandwagon just to pander to transphobic voters.

That's why I chose blahaj zone as my instance. It's nice not having to justify my existence

Good decision by Ada. I'm also quite pleased with how many instance mates stood up in here to defend blahaj's decision.

PS: It occurs to me we might need a name for our peeps. I.e. like one talks about "lemmings" or "redditors", we could use something for members of the divisions by zero. Edit

I feel like this community serves a great purpose. And I'm a massive fan of drinking my tea and reading all the drama it attracts. But I am just beyond tired of the same handful of commenters popping up to always agree with whoever is opposed to blahaj.

I give this one a YDI. Anybody posting anything transphobic who gets caught by Ada is gonna be banned. Any instance with a mod or admin who makes transphobic posts or comments will get defederated. No one is entitled to having their content served on Ada's servers, and the people who join blahaj know that, and seem to appreciate it.

Which is sort of why I always wind up agreeing with her. Her server has clear, concise beliefs, and clear, concise administration, and she has the clear-throated consent of her governed or they would leave.

The only server whose vibe I appreciate more is divide by zero. Shout-out to what I feel is the most neurospicy, nonconformist bunch of pirates I ever met.

How are people still struggling with the basic concept that the person who runs Blahaj can do what they want with Blahaj?

All I get from this type of moaning is: “I joined a decentralised platform and now disagree with decentralisation in action.”

If this kind of action is what it takes for Blahajists to protect their necks then this is how it’s gonna be…

terfs fuck off.

Borderline YDI.

Reasoning for that is that the decision to defederate is one that is in line with the stated goals of blahaj. They have made it clear that they will defederate, ban, or otherwise use the available lemmy tool to allow blahaj to serve as a safe, sheltered place for people that are under siege by the world at large.

Ergo, this can't be a power trip as it isn't arbitrary, or outside of stated goals. Were I a blahaj admin, I would have taken similar steps to maintain the instance as intended, even though I tend to look on defederation as a last ditch tool in general. You can't maintain a truly safe space without aggressive defenses.

If blahaj was established as a general purpose instance, this would be power tripping. But it wasn't, and isn't a general instance. It's like beehaw was; they're using lemmy as the underpinning software, but the instance has a different goal than the typical ones. The federation status is one that's nice but not necessary for the instance to achieve its primary goal.

This is more equivalent to a forum blocking links to breitbart, only at a bigger scale; curation rather than control for control's sake.

However, I want to make it clear that .uk didn't do anything wrong as an instance. That's why it's "borderline" YDI. It's only YDI in the sense that the instance policy is incompatible with the instance goals of blahaj. The decision to aggressively moderate dog whistles is a difficult one, as dog whistles change over time, and are not always something every admin is going to hate resources to do.

Now, once you're aware of a dog whistle, you have a few choices. One is to hide your head in the sand and pretend it isn't anything at all. Another is to remove that specific occurrence, and do nothing else. You can delay a decision until you have time to verify that it is a dog whistle (you don't have to just accept someone's word that it is, no matter who is saying it). You can choose to not give a fuck. You can even agree with the dog whistle and directly support it. You'd be an asshole if you chose that option, but it is an option.

And there's in betweens of all those.

The .uk admin decided to refer to their standing policy and take no action. Since it is a standing policy, it isn't a direct support for the bigotry, only an expression of some factor that leads them to choose not to tale actions outside of instance policy. That factor may be something unpleasant, but that's not the same as being something like bigotry, or even apathy. We don't have anything at the time I'm writing this book from a .uk admin giving further insight. In other words, while I don't agree with their choice, they didn't do anything wrong either, unless there's some evidence of bigotry on their end. And no, just not agreeing to remove a single comment or post is not enough evidence to determine that.

From my end of things, though I won't go far into it because I don't believe in derailing the main goal of this community, dog whistles are so common now, and have been so effective that they get picked up by people that aren't expressly bigoted, they should be as aggressively monitored as possible. But nobody can keep up with all of them, even just one targeted branch of the practice. I try to keep track of the ones that are most relevant to my personal areas of militancy, and I keep running into new ones because the people creating them change them so frequently. But, when reported, they should be taken seriously, and after confirmation, be treated just the same as slurs and other hate speech. I also recognize that nobody is obligated to act before confirmation, and that it may not always be possible to confirm that a newish dogwhistle is one. It takes time for such knowledge to circulate.

TDI (they deserved it) unless Feddit admins pop in with some extravagant response

Defederating an entire instance over the actions of a single user instead of simply banning that user along with creating a post to bring it up but not actually discuss it is just the kind of extreme reaction I expect from Ada.

So some feddit.uk user posting some stuff an Blahaj admin didn't like. So the Blahaj admin want to a feddit.uk admin about it. The feddit.uk admin said, "Let the users sort it out.". People liked what as being said. This made the Blahaj admin so mad. They defederated from feddit.uk because over it.

Jesus, Blahaj always been full of crazy people. But this takes the cake. The feddit.uk admin did nothing wrong.

EDIT If you see a post/comment you don't like. You don't ban or defederate. You write an counter to them to get people to be on your side of it.

fair for both sides, I don't see a PTB here.

Clearly not a power trip, just protecting their user space like they promised they will.

I've composed a little ditty for my barbershop quartet:

"Hell Yeah!"

I'm afraid it loses something in text.

It's totally reasonable for them to enforce their level of anti-bigotry protections to protect their safe space instance. It's not power tripping. Besides feddit.uk is full of full time labour centrist true believers and/or probable astroturfers and is is largely low value subreddit copy paste for their most substantial communities.

PTB

Blahj is a problem instance.

The important distinction here is that they're not simply trying to moderate their communities. They're free to moderate their communities for their users. They want to push their rules on other instances.

They're not free to dictate to the greater social media space the acceptable policies on discourse. Their admins are constantly trying to enforce their ban lists on other servers and communities (or else, you see what happened to feddit.uk).

To see this, go make a new account and get banned from Blahj (you don't even have to post in their communities, see my PTB post as an example) and you'll see that 40+ other completely unrelated communities will also automatically ban you. This is the result of their backroom bullying and toxic behavior towards other admins/mods.

It's easier for an admin or moderator to simply accept their bans than to deal with admins who will take extreme measures, like defederate your entire instance (and lobby others to defederate you) if you don't accept their dictates.

If their goal is to create an instance with communities for trans people then banning users from their communities would serve their goals.

But, that isn't what they're trying to do. This isn't about creating a safe space, they have all of the tools that they need to make Blahj safe. Blahj users in Blahj communities could have been protected from this problem user by the user being banned.

There's no need to contact the admins of other instances to ban a user from your instance or from your communities. Trying to bully other instances or communities isn't required and it is incredibly toxic. Even the moderator here, in this community, has received pressure from Blahj admins about suppressing topics related to Blahj.

Seems fair, I don't think this is PTB

makes sense to me, that is what blahaj is for 😒 besides people that agree with that user don't want to interact with blahaj. And those that do could do it elsewhere