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.
trolls aren't going to not troll just because there are well defined rules, in fact in can have the opposite effect, trolls using the rules as a weapon in their trolling.
in some of your comments you talk about checks and balances in terms of governance. well lemmy is not a democracy plain and simple, server owners have full control, and this is a feature not a bug. having full control means that you can abuse your power sure, but echo chambers aren't fun without people to troll, and the open nature of the fediverse means people will go wherever they like best. and for what it's worth the vibe here is better than anywhere else on lemmy in my experience.
and as for your last point, this space is not intended for transphobes to better themselves, it is meant as a place for trans people to feel safe. if a troll comes here and betters themselves somehow, great, but that's not the goal of this place. we're here because we're sick of having cis het normative being the standard, and we wanna be ourselves, not conform to the straights and what they want us to be.
I agree, I think the most likely outcome would be that the rules would be weaponized, used to try to argue that their particular kind of transphobia wasn't covered and it's unfair to ban them because it wasn't specifically cited, etc.
EDIT:
I keep wondering if it's worth having a separate instance for an /r/AskTransgender kind of community for people with questions and to help cis people engage in dialogue and learn more about trans folks.
While it's an unmitigated good to have safe spaces (esp. since there are so few for trans folks), I personally love to torture myself by talking to trans-naive or even transphobic folks, and would love to help well-intended people learn and grow if they are interested (even if realistically, that's not how most of those interactions go, lol). Obviously this isn't the place for that, I just wish there were a sort of border zone where those kinds of interactions could happen.