This is an admin post, intended for blahaj lemmy users. Top level posts from members of other instances will be removed.
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Edit - Hexbear announced plans to deferedate from us.
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After recent events, it feels to me that sentiment has shifted and more people are asking for defederation of hexbear than previously
I’ve been doing my best to try and mend bridges and keep us connected, as it’s my hope that we can maintain trans solidarity and work with them, despite the friction, however, ultimately, I feel that this is an issue for the blahaj lemmy community to decide, not the admins alone
So here’s what we’re going to do
We’re going to leave things as they are for a week. That will give time for things to calm down whilst we see if we can work together. After a week, I’ll put up a vote and get a feel for where the community is at in regards to our continued federation with hexbear. That poll will run for a week. If there is a strong will to defederate (a clear majority), then that’s what we will do
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When I moved from Reddit to Lemmy, I made an account on blahaj.zone because I wanted to be on an instance that’s run by progressive trans people. Being able to trust that the admins will run an instance that’s actually protective of its members is such a relief, especially coming from Reddit.
Experiencing Lemmy for the first time was an adjustment. I was using “all” when I normally don’t, and that brought a lot of new things, good and bad, into my feed. There were some posts and comments that I found gross, but the things were dealt with or not so bad.
I started noticing a lot of NSFW posts from lemmynsfw with women that looked very young, and I found myself thinking about whether or not to report the content and how the moderators were verifying content. As young looking as possible while being legal and without getting banned was obviously the purpose. I was relieved when defederation happened. All of a sudden my feed was still diverse content, just minus jailbait-simulator. I missed the A+ posts by some of the guys, an Adonis or three, but I survived.
Things were great, then I started noticing the “fuck Ukraine, NATO is evil” posts along with “Tianamen square deaths are CIA propaganda”. That’s when hexbear federated. Lemmy.ml brought different perspectives, and they were valuable regardless of me agreeing or not. Hexbear is different.
Touting LGBT rights in Cuba, that’s great, and I didn’t know about the the changes in 2022. TIL. That’s my entire list of positive hexbear posts I’ve seen so far. I’m sure there’s more, but the community doesn’t seem to prioritize showing that. “Dunking” and snark are not valuable contributions, and the simping for Putin is straight up evil.
Ada and other admins/mods, thank you so much for your thoughtful consideration, your work, and everything you give to make this community run. I’m just a lurker, but I appreciate you all so much.
I have been watching my love tie herself in knots over the last several days, having to deal with the drama that has been brought on, trying her best to bring everyone back together.
There’s been bad behaviour from both sides, and I’m really disappointed to see that some of the worst of it came from our users, who didn’t keep to the moral high ground, disregarded our instance rules and stoopped to levels of behaviour worse than that leveled against them.
There have been accusations against us (or Ada specifically) that we are a safe harbour for bad behaviour and cause harm to trans people through our inaction.
This is perhaps the cruelest accusation they could have leveled at Ada, as she works tirelessly to maintain a safe space for our community, and while I was hoping, for all the effort that she was investing into this issue, that she could make it work despite my own reservations, this last attack on her impeccable morality has made me very angry.
I’m sorry for those that wanted to remain federated, sorry that it came to this, but I am glad it’s over now, purely for the mental health of my precious beloved.
It was inevitable after their atrocious behavior. It sounds horrible to be caught in such a crossfire as an instance admin. Especially because they used their queerness as a weapon to paint us as the bad ones for splitting the community. A painful reminder that not all queer people are necessarily good people.
Thank you for dealing with this situation and making this instance a safer place.
Straight up, who you choose to associate with says a lot about a person
I’ve known plenty of people in my life who turned out to be shitty people who I stopped associating with due to them being shitty people.
Hell one of my former friends was pan and non-binary. I stopped associating with them due to various personal and political reasons but the straw that broke the camel’s back was them insisting that, “being bi was transphobic,” a few months after they came out to me as non-binary. (I had come out as bi almost a year before they came out to me as non-binary.)
I was friends with them for 6 years, yeah it hurt at first but the bliss that came from stopping to associate with them was nice.
Being able to cut shitty people out of your life is something more people need to find the strength to do.
Personally I don’t agree with the decision to stay federated with them given the kind of community they foster. A great example is that the top post on the thread where they announced the rules change that was enough to remain federated a little longer is straight up abuser language.
I’d recommend checking out the thread and sorting by top to see what the most popular sentiments among the users over there is in regards to other instances.
Don’t participate, but it’s fairly eye opening.
I do hope that when you run the poll you have a way of ensuring that only people in our community can vote on it because given that they have a community on their instance dedicated to dogpiling and brigading I don’t trust them to not interfere with it.
I was fairly neutral after my first post and the admin response until I read that post. There are hexbear folks in that post explicitly saying “the whole point of federation is to dunk on people on other instances”. Also saying things like “you can’t have civil discussion with libs, you have to dunk on them”. Like they’re saying “we’re federated to be assholes to people who disagree with us”, which is a hard pass from me.
To be clear, it has nothing to to with being leftist. It has nothing to do with being trans. It has everything to do with them wanting to be assholes.
Hopefully their mods can reign stuff in to prevent that kind of behavior.
I’m happy to remain federated; I think the communities, mods and the instance admins (thanks!) do a good job of curating the community, and by and large hexbear users interacting with us on this instance seem to do so in good faith.
That being said, I would make the observation that, from my perspective at least, there seem to be more than a few hexbear users that are apologists for authoritarian regimes. I want to preface this by saying that I am of an anarchist bent, so am not exactly enamoured with ‘Western’ political systems either, but this should not preclude criticism of (bringing up the most often contested examples) the USSR or China.
That being said, discussion of these things are important and differing views should be seen, as I have often found enlightening articles or overlooked areas of history through reading these kinds of discussion.
Bottom line: I would remain federated, but ensure we maintain the character of our instance.
Yeah. I certainly do not like the support for authoritarian regimes. Like, sorry if I don’t like the idea of putting my trust and life in the hands of some small handful of people in power. No matter whether they are the capitalist owner class or dictators. We don’t need to apologize for Russia or China to oppose and criticize the west.
I think not much value would be lost by defederating.
They are denying genocides, they are supporting regimes which are not compatible with LGBT+, they don’t discuss in good faith, there is a lot of whataboutism. They want to dunk people and be right and not have their view challenged.
Unfortunately they have so radical ideas about it all (mostly US centric whataboutism as far as I can tell). They fall into fascist/authoritarian traps where they can’t even recognize they are fighting against people like me or us. They dehumanize people.
I don’t think their views are compatible with LGBT+ spaces and values even though they claim to be one while cheering for the people who would remove them from existence the first chance they would get.
Some people are moderate over there and that were the only pleasant interactions I had with them. I can’t tell if the radicals are a loud minority or the majority. They poison the well though.
Even after all that said I don’t know if defederation is the right choice. I mean they provide some good content and in the end they are a big community. On the other hand I have already blocked the instance using the Connect app and my experience improved a lot.
I think in summary they create a hostile space for all people. Even left leaning people are not safe due to their radicalized views and it is exhausting to have every thread derailed with some unrelated rant by them.
I don’t believe anyone on hexbear is actually cheering for people who would remove us from existence. I’m LGBT+ myself, and a huge part of why I’m against the current capitalist system we live under is that I see it as incredibly harmful for people like me. There are numerous examples, such as anti-trans laws in the US, the extreme anti-trans rhetoric in the UK, the American funding of draconian anti-LGBT+ laws in African countries. I also truly don’t value people in western countries higher than people in the rest of the world, so when I see the death toll from our military interventions and siege warfare in the form of sanctions, it makes my blood boil. 100s of thousands of people were killed by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan alone; statistically thousands of them were LGBT+. This means the coalition forces killed more queer people than the countries that have actual death penalties for homosexuality.
I don’t love Russia, they’re a capitalist country with terrible laws and a regressive culture, but Ukraine isn’t really any better. They’ve elevated right wing militias which have targeted people like me and banned trans women from leaving the country.
China is behind on LGBT+ rights, but seem to be moving in the right direction. Cuba has the most progressive LGBT+ laws in the world. Vietnam is moving in the right direction pretty rapidly as well.
I hope this helps you understand why at least one of our users thoughts on these issues. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but I feel certain my views are quite close to the majority of hexbears.
At least half of it is reasonable and I would fully agree with it. Unfortunately then it went of the rails.
I read the same argument the other day with the US/NATO wars/invasions and equated to the persecution of other countries and that’s just ridiculous. If they were sent there and died because they were queer it would be a whole other story, but if they were there because they were equal to their comrades then it was the actual equality we strive for. Not that I support any wars or any military, but that rhetoric is just dumb. Also guess what this is true for any military ever. Queer people exist even if they don’t have the freedom to live their lives in the open.
Regarding Ukraine it doesn’t really matter. Russia is the agressor here. There is no way Ukraine was ever a threat to Russia yet here we are. It is a developing souvereign (!) country with many problems they try to solve one step at a time. Russia is actively working against everything we fight for. Whatever you believe Ukraine is the situation got only worse due to Russia and there is no way the invasion should ever be glorified by any sane queer person at all.
Funny you mentioned Cuba. Cuba still has major problems with corruption and all the LGBT+ laws are very, very recent additions. I want it to be a success story probably for the same reasons as you, but let’s wait and see for a few more years or decades. I dearly hope they manage and so far it looks better than ever, but unfortunately that’s not great yet.
Anyway this post is also a great example for the US centric whataboutism I talked about in my initial post.
I’m very confused by what you mean about sending people to die? I’m talking about civilian deaths due to invasions and sanctions. I don’t believe you can actually be supporting queer people while bombing them and/or starving them with sanctions.
I also don’t fully agree that my arguments are us-centric. I focus on the US and UK because I am Anglo and so am more aware of the role they play in the world.
Wars are all the same. The argument is just dumb. Either queer people are targeted specifically or it is irrelevant to any discussion about queer persecution.
I don’t love Russia, they’re a capitalist country with terrible laws and a regressive culture, but Ukraine isn’t really any better.
Fuck off with this bothsides bullshit. Russia did literally outlaw offering gender affirming treatment to trans people last month. Ukraine is far, far behind what should be acceptable both legally and socially, but you can receive gender affirming treatment and change your legal documents. One country is actively regressing in human rights in an attempt to distance themselves from everything they consider “The West”, while the other is doing the very opposite.
It’s still a shithole of a country, but equating them is an insult to all trans people living in Russia and you only felt you had the need to do it because of the never ending struggle of some miopic political factions to instill anti-interventionism sentiment when a country edging on the border of fascism has invaded their neighbours.
