That post explicitly says itās not a place for debate or participation from users of other instances.
Iād like to respect that but I think events like this need debate and discussion because it helps to develop and evolve the culture of lemmy and the fediverse in general.
The post says:
This post is āFYI onlyā for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the āadult human femaleā dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and ācivil disagreementā on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to āsort it out through discussion and votingā. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little āsorting outā has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
I find it absolutely crazy that they de-federated over 1 user, when a block would suffice.
I donāt agree with transphobia (of course), but BlĆ„haj canāt demand that their rules be enforced in other instances.
I think this take is a bit disingenuous. From what I can tell, LBZ defederated because the admins ignored requests from ada to reign in transphobia/clarify rules around dealing with transphobic comments or posts.
Defederation is the opposite of enforcing one instanceās rules on another instance. Both sets of instance rules are still intact. LBZ has chosen to stop federation because of their own instance rules. If changes are made and the instance rules and enforcement no longer break LBZās instance rules, Iām willing to bet ada and LBZ would be open to federate again.
Extremely disingenuous given the whole chain failed for an instance serving a geographic zone literally nicknamed āTERF islandā that recently made an extremely transphobic ruling in parliament
Context reaaaaaaaaally fuckinā matters
They can and they did.
I think most instances have a baseline of what is not acceptable, even on other instances. This is one of those baseline rules.
They can, or choose not to interoperate with servers that donāt have their best interests at heart. Thatās the whole point of defederation and people honestly need to understand that. I know in the beginning the Fediverse propaganda painted this place as a free speech safe-haven. That is a lie, this place has rules and servers expect you to follow them. They arenāt obligated to tolerate bullshit. Blahaj.zone isnāt obligated to tolerate or listen to transphobia.
Also one important fact here is that feddit.uk themselves has rules against transphobia. Itās not even about following blahajās rules, itās about them not following their own rules now.
Didnāt ask them to, nor have I asked any other instances to defederate from feddit.uk. What I asked for is clarification of how they implement their own rules, in order for me to decide whether or not LBZ stays federated with them.
The truth is, transphobia is now legal in the UK. UK instance admins are in a hard spot, because removing transphobia that is institutionally protected in their own country is now a lot more complex.
However, itās not more complex for blahaj zone. We donāt allow transphobia. End of story. And if the difficult situation feddit.uk finds themselves in means they will allow transphobia that aligns with the UKs legislation, Iām not going to tell them they should do otherwise. I would hope they do otherwise, but ultimately, itās their call. However, if the call they make is to allow legal transphobia, we will remain defederated to minimise the transphobia that reaches the blahaj zone community.
And you wonāt see me telling any other admins they have to make the same choice we do.
The power of federation is that people have the choice. If people, trans or not, are happy to wade in to debate with transphobes, there are options for them to do that. Or, there are instances like blahaj zone, where they donāt have to play whack a mole with every new transphobe that appears.