I've seen a lot of instances of people on Lemmy saying you can get banned from Blahaj for forgetting someone's pronouns. And then Ada has to come in and explain why they're wrong in their interpretation of the rules. These people were banned for good reasons, they're transphobes. But I think they misunderstand the rules of Blahaj for a legitimate reason.
It's because Blahaj doesn't have rules. It has two guidelines. Very subjective ones. People want to know what will get them banned, so they try to understand the rules of that subjectivity. The rules for what Ada considers to be empathy and inclusion. The rules of Ada's psychology. Because like it or not, with highly subjective guidelines, Ada's interpretation and understanding of that subjectivity is the rules.
And Ada didn't write the rules of her psychology in the sidebar. So people have to speculate. And people are speculating wrong, and starting arguments about it.
I think a ruleset should be a transparent explanation of how a mod team thinks about acceptable behaviour. By not having rules, Blahaj is being opaque about how the mod team thinks. And the only way for people to deal with that is to practice amateur psychoanalysis. Which is unpleasant and creates division.
If people understood how trans people think about acceptable behaviour, they wouldn't be transphobes. So the result of this system is that everyone who is banned for transphobia doesn't understand why and needs it personally explained to them. If the sidebar explained acceptable behaviour in a way everyone can understand, they wouldn't misunderstand it so often.
I think the current system is creating pointless drama.
I disagree completely
Principles are always better than rules.
Rules are inflexible, and lead people into thinking that there's ways around them, that you can game the system because the rules aren't written that way. It also leads to thinking that if it isn't a rule, you can do it.
Guiding principles are flexible, more enduring. But they take more work on the part of the people handling situations as they arise.
A set of principles, with examples, tends to work much better long term.
Otherwise, you just keep stacking rules. You stack rules high enough, nobody can remember them all, and they topple.
Besides, ain't nothing about lemmy fully democratic. At some point, someone is handling the hardware and keeping the connection alive. Whoever that happens to be is the one that has to carry the weight of decisions, even if there's an illusion of collaboration. Maybe if society as a whole gets rebuilt, it could be fully community run, but I tend to believe humans suck at that once the group gets over about a dozen people, so I'm dubious something as big as an instance is ever gong to actually function without an organizer (be that a smaller group or an individual).
But, here, now, on this instance, it's working very well. It weeded out folks that didn't agree with the principles as explained. It made a clear line to anyone not on the instance, and it is definitely known that those principles are not to be fucked with
That seems like a highly successful forum to me.
Who cares about external criticism at all? Even internal criticism is of dubious value when the goal is a protected community. Hell internal and external validation is of dubious value. What matters is that things work. And they do. Very, very well.
The whole idea that someone banned for transphobic activity needs a personal explanation is, frankly, malarkey. Blahaj ain't about the folks that aren't on board with the goals. That's the only explanation needed: you done fucked up, bye.
You know the idea of "It isn't my job to educate you"? It's part of every marginalized group's evolution. At some point, it isn't the black person's job to educate white people about their lived experience. It isn't the gay man's job to explain to the straights what gay culture is, and why they have a right to exist.
It isn't the admins' job to educate any of us. Their job is keeping things running, and keeping the space one that folks can just be in.
Rules. Rules. They're fine for some things. I don't think they're useful here.
Which, please note that my statement of external validation being of dubious value applies to this entire comment.
But, for me, I see what they're doing here, and it's beautiful.