Update: In light of the programming.dev update here https://programming.dev/post/8399272, the defederation is no longer going ahead.
However, something more needs to be said. Even here on Blahaj, some of our users took issue with the choice to defederate over this issue.
So I would like to give some background and context.
Blahaj Zone exists, because both Kaity and I left mainstream social media to escape transphobia. Reddit, with its lackluster approach to fighting transphobia, and twitter, with its outright celebration of transphobia pushed us here, to the fediverse, and to create Blahaj Zone and Blahaj Lemmy.
To that end, we will continue to treat transphobia seriously. Our goal is to create a space where gender diverse folk can exist and let our defenses down a little, where we don’t have to worry about getting dragged in to an argument with a transphobe, or a bad faith actor “just asking questions”.
If you are looking for a more reddit like experience, where in the interest of increased engagement, we let low level transphobia slide, and push responsibility for dealing with it on to community mods and individual users, then you will likely not be happy with blahaj going forward. If you choose to stay here, understand that we may defederate again in the future over similar issues.
The choice is yours.
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It has recently been brought to my attention that the lead admin of programming.dev is engaging in ongoing transphobia.
You can see the conversation in question here https://programming.dev/comment/6131539
For that reason we will be defederating from programming.dev in 48 hours.
There are only three communities on that instance used by small number of our users, so this won’t have a big impact, but if you are one of those users, you will need to use an alt account on another instance if you wish to access the communities.
Oh no they see the spam and bullying behavior (they’ve even been on the receiving end of it) they don’t see it as a problem because they’re a “trans positive instance”.
And the politics of the Hexbears is something they’re seemingly willing to overlook in the name of keeping trans positive communities together.
Yeah, the admin ain’t great and the only reason I’m still hear is because the overlap in communities I want to be federated with and one’s I don’t want to be federated with currently align enough. As long as Hexbear stays defederated (and I believe Lemmygrad (almost as bad as Hexbear) is as well but IDK). But defederating with programming.dev is a big deal IMO.
I’m curious though how our admin found out about that one thread with the admin of programming.dev. Looking in the thread I didn’t see them, but I did see a bunch of Hexbears. My guess is Hexbear in their dog piling decided to inform our admin (probably en masse) about the thread once it completely went to shit to drive a wedge to isolate our community further. Hell that thread was 2 days ago and this announcement came out only a few hours ago.
Yeah that’s really weird because hexbear often behaves in a way that paints trans people in a bad light, including the fact that they often push for certain ideologies and philosophies that are directly harmful to trans people. As well as certain philosophies that hurt everyone in general like being pro-genocide. How are they in any way a good representation of this community or the people in it, and how is it good for this community to have such destructive people tearing the place up?