I think we have a fundamental difference in understanding in what defederation is, as a tool for admins to use.

While it should be the last tool to pull out, the entire point of it is to limit the spread of problematic content on an instance level.

This means that, if an instance is allowing things to stay up, other instances can defederate all at once instead of planning playing whack-a-mole with individual users.

While we’re currently talking about a situation involving dogwhistles, let’s step to the side and look at the concept itself.

There’s a list of instances recommended for defederation that can be a default. That list includes places that allow kiddie porn, places run by, or catering to nazis and their ilk, and even lemmygrad as an extremist instance.

Why not just block all those users individually instead of defederating?

I hope it’s obvious why not, that it would be a never ending moderation nightmare. The more a given instance is prone to a given kind of situation, regardless of what that might be, the more you have to consider defederation instead of individual bans.

Bringing that back to this situation, the question becomes one of thresholds. What is the right amount of transphobic dogwhistles to allow into an instance that’s by and for trans people?

In this case, Ada has set the threshold low. This has always been the case, so it isn’t something out of the blue.

When an instance is meant to be heavily curated in terms of screening out types of content, an admin is limited in their choices. If the instance has the means to have a big enough team, you can have people actively looking for content that isn’t acceptable and banning users. Or you can use defederation to screen out instances that are prone to the unwanted content.

Since there aren’t any instances with the kind of funding necessary to have a team of full time, 24/7 moderators screening the entirety of lemmy, defederation is the more realistic choice. It is something an admin team can deploy temporarily or permanently as the situation shifts.

So, I think it comes down to thresholds. Blahaj is set up as, and maintained as, a trans first space, a shelter for trans people online. They have a very low threshold because that’s the only way to meet that goal with the resources available to their instance. It seems you believe their threshold to be too low. Fair enough, we’re all allowed to have an opinion on the matter.

I would, however, point you to this very community, and suggest you go back through older posts. Blahaj is brought up frequently for banning users for this very thing. So, if they’re power tripping when they apply preemptive bans to users, and they’re power tripping when they defederate, what tools are they supposed to use? There aren’t any other tools at this point in lemmy development. There’s not even an automod to handle removing content on the fly, before it gets seen.

Iirc, the only filter that lemmy has for that is limited to a small range of slurs, and isn’t editable by admins. My memory may be faulty in that regard; if it is editable, and it can work on content from other instances, then that would be the better tool to use. But, afaik, it can’t do either. Last time I saw an explanation of how it works, it would only stop things on the individual instance, not federated content. Again, unless I misunderstood.

Then you run into the crowd that hates the idea of automod, so let’s be honest here, the blahaj team would be accused of power tripping if they did use something like that.

When it comes down to it, no matter what the blahaj team does, they’re going to catch hell. But the consequences of doing nothing are much worse. And, I’m going to be blunt as fuck here, 90% of the pissiness about blahaj’s rules and decisions catch hell that they either wouldn’t catch, or wouldn’t be as severe, because it’s a trans focused instance.

Do you remember beehaw at all? They completely defederated, and there was less venom towards them than for the selective defederation blahaj does. Admittedly, lemmy was smaller then, and there was venom, but not at the same scale.

I went back through the two main threads just now, and see no updates.

With that in mind, I do believe that if the comments haven’t been removed, at least temporarily, the matter has gone on too long. It has been long enough to verify the dogwhistle is in common enough use that even if the person using it didn’t know what it means, a moderator or admin should know and have taken action.

Even with the shitty state of search engines nowadays, it is possible to find out that a specific dogwhistle is known and in use within a few hours. Since it was something that I ran into months ago, it’s easy to confirm with A Wikipedia search

Since the recent UK court ruling is absolutely not applicable to this situation, and they’ve given no other reasoning for a decision being delayed on this matter, I don’t feel it would be reasonable for the comments to still be up. I don’t know if they are. Nobody has linked to them and shouldn’t have because brigading sucks even for this kind of thing, so I don’t know if the comments are still there.

Which, I think that brings us into complete agreement at this time. Rule 1 should have been applied already. If it hasn’t been, then it is implicit support for the comments.

Which is a valid viewpoint, obviously.

However, dogwhistles are a difficult thing to moderate. You first have to be aware that they exist (they are), then you have to be aware that a specific phrase is one (they do now), you’d have to verify that the report is one (still up in the air), and then decide what to do about it (still in the air).

Moderation does not have to be instant. Even if you have dozens of moderators or admins, expecting action even within an hour isn’t something to reasonably expect. Now, I haven’t gone back through and checked to see what they’ve decided at this point, if anything, but you and I are still talking about the principle itself, so I don’t know if that matters for this part of this particular discussion. As in, was the delay at the time of the post reasonable.

I agree with you that a comment using that dogwhistle needs to be removed. I agree that if it isn’t, then there’s a problem. The only point I see that we don’t agree on so far is how quickly an admin is expected to step in on a moderation case.

By this point, I would expect at least an update on the matter, some kind of “this is where we are in the process”. But, at the time of the post and the start of this particular conversation, I believe that they were still well within the range of an acceptable time frame for a policy decision on an unfamiliar dogwhistle.

Again, I’m still talking about events as of the time we started this chain. If you want to shift to what would be an acceptable state now we can, but I’ll need to go through both of the posts I’m aware of and update.

Well, I disagree, obviously.

This isn’t the appropriate community for a debate about what is and isn’t necessary for the struggle to minimize bigotry, so I won’t say much beyond the fact that trans people get killed all across the world, regularly, for no reason other than being trans. With that ugly fact in existence, I can not object to anyone working against the hatred towards them.

You call it bullying, I call it activism and struggling for protection.

I don’t think I would be able to change your view on the matter, and I know you can’t change mine because I’ve seen the violence and hate first hand. So I don’t have anything else to say here.

Fair enough.

If I may, allow me to explain why I think it was a not wrong decision. Now, notice how I phrased it this time, please. It is definitely different in implication from my original phrasing, and that does represent some thought that has occurred since the time of the comment.

.uk is run by multiple admins. It is run as something between a collective and something akin to a democracy within the admin team. When it comes to making a decision for the instance that would require a change to policy, or a deviation from policy, a single admin making the decision without consulting the others would be a bet difficult choice.

It would require that admin to explain their decision going against established policy, possibly creating a big problem, one that could result in long term instability for the instance, possibly even the breaking of an instance.

A single admin holding to policy means that the instance is running as intended. The policies may need changing, but it isn’t a decision that is an emergency. There’s plenty of time for admins to discuss things, debate, weigh possibilities, come up with a plan, verify the plan would be effective, maybe even explore the possibilities publicly.

A delay is not a bad thing, when the issue is one that requires a change to policy. Since the admins have stated that they are discussing it, and that their reason for delay isn’t support for the comments in question, their decision to move slowly is not wrong as an instance. To the contrary, with it not being an emergency, it’s the smart decision.

Now, I’ll also say that the specific admin Ada contacted has publicly stated that they’re concerned about running afoul of UK regulations, and thus are weighing that in as part of any decisions regarding policies on dogwhistles as a form of transphobia, I’ll add that the specific admin did not make a wrong decision either.

However! As an individual admin, they did do something wrong, but not about the decision itself. Poor communication about internal matters when dealing with a credible issue reported by a reliable and known member of the fediverse that is also an admin and would understand even the most barebones explanation was a bad decision. I hesitate to call it wrong, but it fits that word well enough in this context for it to be acceptable, imo.

So, o would amend my previous opinion “didn’t do anything wrong as an instance” to “didn’t make a wrong decision as an instance”, as it more accurately reflects both the events as known to me at this time, and my opinion on those events. I hope it obvious that if more information comes to light, that opinion could, and almost certainly would, change if the new information was relevant to the previous events.

I say it that way because if .uk decided to just allow dogwhistles to go unchallenged and to stay up because of that, it would be wrong, in my opinion; but it wouldn’t change whether or not previous actions were appropriate or not unless there was an indication that was the intent all along.

Now, I also have to say that inaction being implicit support isn’t true in all cases all the time, and that statements do matter (or should) in coming to the conclusion that that is what’s occuring, but I don’t think anyone has to agree with me on those two subjects. They’re tangential to the issue here, in c/ptb to begin with, and I do believe that when the issue is dogwhistles, it does hold true with certain criteria met, so I agree in this case anyway.

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.

Not a user, the admin.

It looks like a reaction to the user on the surface, but it’s the lack of communication and the policies that drove the decision, based on the post in question.

Unless you’re saying you don’t believe the reason given, which is a different issue, and totally your right

Id say it’s the mindset of the experienced linux user that matters.

If you’re willing to tell a person, “if you run into trouble, call me”, and then follow up when they do, half the fight is over.

Most people, they try it and it’s fine, as long as the basics are there. You show them where the browser and email are, set up desktop shortcuts to important stuff, and answer questions, and they’ll eventually not even think about the fact that it isn’t windows.

But the first time they run into trouble, and you can’t give them an answer in a reasonable amount of time, they blame Linux, because they forgot how long it took them to figure out windows originally, and aren’t willing to look things up even if that’s what they did when they ran into a Windows problem.

So, you gotta play tech support for a while if you’re the one introducing them.

You aren’t going to change mindsets inside someone else in any realistic timeframe.

Yup, que

I love the typo because it covers so many things at once

Queue as in they’re lining up to do it; cue, as in that’s their cue to be stupid; and que (spanish for what) as in what the fuck are they thinking?

With a face like that, he doesn’t even have to try

Me around this dog:

Oops dropped some ham!

Five seconds later:

Oops dropped some ham!

Five seconds later

Oops dropped some ham!

And then stop, because I don’t want a dog to be unhealthy, but I’d feel really bad about not dropping some ham

Look, ima be real here.

As long as people aren’t lined up watching other people excrete wastes, I’m fine with whoever wants to use whatever bathroom.

Like, I’m a dude, and y’all trans men are welcome to stare at the wall right beside me. We will piss in solidarity. Y’all trans women, take the stall if you want/need, or post up and piss right along with the rest of the folks evacuating their bladders. You cis women, c’mon in, the water’s fine. Just understand that there’s some unwritten rules involved. And, if you haven’t a penis, bring one of those funnel things for urinal usage as pissing on one’s feet is considered unmanly.

When you’re at the urinal, you only ever look at your neighbor if you believe they may need an ambulance. Otherwise, you pick a spot with some interesting graffiti and stare at it, but only if it is not beyond two inches to the side of the urinal you are using. If at a trough, use your shoulders as the border.

If there is no other choice, and you have to speak with someone next to you, do not look at them. Look up at the ceiling. This way, everyone knows you aren’t looking at their junk, and nobody has to worry about being measured.

However, be aware that if you shake it more than twice, you’re playing with it, no matter what it is. So, take it to a stall, you heathen.

If in the stall, remember the courtesy flush. It is also strongly encouraged to give a “sorry bros” if nearby stalls are occupied. Rounds of applause for extraordinarily thunderous flatulence are allowed; but please, no standing ovations.

Should you find a hole in the stall wall, be aware that it is your obligation to gently stroke anything that comes through said hole. I don’t make the rules, I just follow them like everyone else does.

Also, it is imperative that when the circle jerk starts, that your hands are well lotioned, and you sing along with everyone else. It will usually be either “row, row your boat” or “Michael row your boat ashore”, so make sure you have the lyrics memorized, and do try to stay on key. In the event the standard songs are not in play, it is acceptable to hum along; just don’t expect much in the way of aftercare.

I would strongly encourage everyone to memorize and share these rules, since very soon all ladies’ rooms will be forbidden to all. Can’t have anyone that might have a penis, even if that penis is in their womb. You know how penises get in the ladies’ room, jumping around, spitting on everything, leaving a mess all over the counters, throwing the sanitary supplies into any waiting receptacle (including the astonished mouths of bystanders). All of which is just flat not acceptable when said penis is in the womb still, show some respect.

I mean, if it gets solved, leaving it up would be better, particularly if the reason for it is something that might happen to someone else

Mastodon on my pen name.

Piefed for the hell of it.

Used to use one of the “key” forks, but the instance I was on shut down, and I never went back.

Haven’t really bothered with the rest because they don’t fit any needs, and tend to be based around things that aren’t my personal interests enough to use regularly. Peertube, I’ll never put videos up, but I use it when other people link to it.

That’s really it. I don’t want/need the kind of services friendica is for, nor whatever the name of the Instagram clone is, and loops is totally not my thing.

I don’t have anything against them, mind you, I just don’t use those kind of platforms

I mean, c’mon. It’s a fucking clown shoe running the show.

The only question is if I’m talking about the thing in the picture, or the one that took the mod action.

The answer to that question is yes.

Look, a hand job is a hand job

Yeah, the optimistic people in the field might have the rosy outlook to say in about a decade currently, but they’ll usually kinda start mumbling if you try to pin them down on it.

Only person I know that’s keeping up with the various attempts to regrow or replace teeth as a professional has said we might see the very first wave of it around maybe 2040ish, if everything goes well, with early trials sometime after 2030ish. And even getting them to be that predictive was with the promise to never quote them by name because “there are so many steps between what’s going on and human trials that could fail or go wrong, shit is still science fiction to me”

Damn, I can hear the wheezing from here

That’s a lotta fucking Newports

Fuck, how did I miss that? My bad!

Yeah, that essentially negates my entire comment, sorry. That is fucked up. That’s way outside of what an admin should be poking their nose into without some serious evidence to back it up and the willingness to provide it here since this community is on that instance.

Again, my apologies for misreading. I’d blame my dyslexia, but the word admin doesn’t fall afoul of that, I just wasn’t paying enough attention.