this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Blåhaj Lemmy is a Lemmy instance attached to blahaj.zone. This is a group for questions or discussions relevant to either instance.

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As posted about recently in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca it seems that @nutomic@lemmy.ml's stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don't think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it's open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it's very likely they won't have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.

I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can't speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn't inspire much confidence either.

Edit: Since some people haven't seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don't want to see that, don't open the spoiler.

CW: Transphobic talking points

I'd really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj's local community on this, I'm not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren't from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).

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[–] Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

yea let's defederate.

somthin somthin terf-tankie-whatevr... somthin along those lines... i dun evn kno whad those words mean

[–] InfiniteHench@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago
  • TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (transphobia)
  • Tankie = Apologists for outright oppressive, murderous regimes like Putin's Russia and North Korea

seen a couple of TERFs get bullied off of my fedi TLs lately and it warms my heart

[–] rob299@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 16 hours ago

If there is content on defederated instances users want access to they can make accounts on other servers.

Not to automatically assume that these users want to see hateful content, but as generally small that Lemmy is, some users might feel that defederating from such a massive server not worth the lack of content and communication. Blahaj does great with protecting trans users I appreciate this, but I would suggest to consider the overall health of Lemmy overall and what such a drastic action might have on their own community. Could it results on the communities activity to decline due to less interaction?

There might be some bad communities and some other good ones on lemmy.ml, with activity and if the largest servers are defederated, now users will have to make multiple accounts on other servers and hope that they can see certain content, when it use to be if they wanted to make multiple accounts just because.

[–] ImADifferentBird@lemmy.blahaj.zone 46 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Multiple states: "Let's literally use the force of law to ban trans people from existing."

This jackoff: "Hmmm, I just don't know if the bourgeoisie is really against trans rights! It's so hard to tell!"

I'm not going to weigh in on the defederation issue. I don't use enough .ml communities to know how this guy's views reflect in the moderation policies of the instance. But fuck him in particular.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

Generally .ml is pretty trans rights, because their mods are hexbear alts.

This is just petty splitter bullshit, same as always...

But I also block .ml because their mods policies annoy me.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 7 points 12 hours ago

ml is pretty trans rights, because their mods are hexbear alt

Hexbear has had its fair share of issues with sexism and objectification of trans women. There was a pretty big upset a while ago where people spoke up about being harassed, the community's reaction to it was pretty shitty.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 19 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

My experience is that hexbear only care about trans rights when criticizing "west". As soon as China or Russia are discussed, they turn surprisingly silent.

YMMV

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 3 points 17 hours ago

Yeah that's probably fair, on a global political level. Still leaves them pretty rabid in terms of what they'll let you say without banning you though.

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[–] meh@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 1 day ago

I don't think anything significant would be lost by dumping ml. two years ago sure, the platform was too small but now ml is just annoying. I don't know how the governance of that sever is set up. but if nutomic has control of the domain, its more a question of when will he decide to change ml rules. I trust ada to make the call when federation with ml becomes a problem. guess i'm just chiming in to reaffirm that for when the time comes. don't know how lemmy as a platform grows long term if nutomic retains any level of control over it. but i'll probably just be following you fuckin weirdos onto the next platform so it's not that big a deal. maybe it could be a nostalgic return to internet forums.

[–] RymrgandsDaughter@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is this guy even real? lmao at this point he might as well admit to being a christo-facist

[–] FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

They're doing what many TERFs do, trying to cover up their bigotry with politeness and trying to sound like it's about logic or discussing the meaning of things. Trying to make their transphobia seem acceptable. Then they say trans people are unreasonable when they get called out or banned for their bigotry.

Well terfs are definitely nazis

[–] Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 28 points 1 day ago

I personally blocked ml a long time ago and my experience is much better for it. Their moderation and userbase leave much to be desired. As far as nutomic, I would say it seems like hes not a good person from what I know, and especially this post.

[–] hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone 31 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

This feels like cherry picked examples to try and frame nutomic as being transphobic. Its always this one screenshot, of a comment made in response to something else that I have never seen posted any of the times this has been brought up. A response without context is kind of sus.

Being uninformed or misinformed is not bigotry. There was a time when I probably would have said something similar, before I learned more, and knew better. I don't think this is strong evidence of a real issue.

Until the point that he makes more questionable statements about trans or lgbtqia2s+ people, this is fine as far as I'm concerned. I don't think what I have seen so far is actionable.

Edit: from reading Ada's comments in this thread I endorse her stance.

From the very strict enforcement standards of this instance, the DM was enough to warrant a ban for nutomic, but not enough to warrant defederation for ml. That seems fine until or unless more information comes to light.

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[–] Zetta@mander.xyz 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

I think defederating almost any instance is dumb, not my instance though so do what you will.

[–] ManlickerM2001@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I personally haven't seen any transphobic posts on .ml so I don't see a reason to block the whole instance. I also see some folx ITT taking issue with the left-leaning user base of .ml, but I don't think we should enforce political views that aren't related to LGBT rights here.

[–] Genius@lemmy.zip 21 points 1 day ago

taking issue with the left-leaning user base of .ml

Nobody who isn't an avid .ml user thinks the problem is their leftism. If it was, instances like Blahaj and db0 would get the same hate. I'm guessing this is your Blahaj alt account?

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[–] pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 72 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Personally, I don't think his shitty views necessarily translate into .ml moderation policy and action, which to me would be the problem that defederation is meant to solve.

That said, I wouldn't mind defed-ing from them in general, as most of my unpleasant interactions in the fediverse have been with .ml users.

Ultimately, I'll back Ada on what she thinks and decides. She's very level headed and strict with other instances as far as blahaj zones mission statement is concerned, and I trust her completely.

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[–] Commiunism@beehaw.org 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

It's the first time I see the transphobic original message, and honestly I'm not surprised to see it within ML community. In general, they and the ideology is already rather cultish given their beliefs and the shunning of "wrongthink", but there's a smaller subsection of ML's who genuinely believe in this kind of reactionary chauvinism that's a complete bastardization of Marxism.

There's probably no one on this specific community who goes "hmm maybe there's some merit to that statement", but in case there is:

Trans people exist, and much like proletarians, their experience is shaped by our society and material conditions. They suffer through medical gatekeeping, discrimination and state violence among other things, all of them stemming from structures of capitalist domination, and just because occasionally some bourgeoisie opportunistically exploit these issues to garner support/profit from rainbow capitalism and the like, doesn't mean you should go full reactionary.

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[–] Filetternavn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 66 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (20 children)

Personally, I have a very poor opinion of nutomic. And yes, he has always been/felt transphobic. He has a history of making massive oversteps to attack people that have differing opinions to his, and overall I believe him to be a threat to the trans community. As for whether we should defederate? I really have no clue. It certainly isn't a bastion for blatant transphobia, and hosts many of the top Lemmy communities, and a very large amount of the active Lemmy userbase. I think the effects of defederation would be immense, and take a lot of time and consideration to understand if it's overall beneficial to the community. That being said, I'm sure I could be swayed to support either side. I'd be very curious what Ada has to say about this, as I believe I'll support her opinion on the matter.

EDIT: I think it's valuable to point out that any individual user can block an instance in their settings. So regardless of any defederation decision (which Ada seems opposed to), anyone can choose to block the instance themselves.

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 44 points 1 day ago

I'm not on my blahaj account, but I can copy/paste there if you'd prefer. Just seemed pointless when I use the same user name to switch over.

But I'm mainly giving some background to the whole matter, rather than primarily "voting" about defederation.

It's interesting that nutomic wants to get all het up after asking for donations to lemmy development.

That's largely why they've been so active in comments lately. They can't seem to keep from expecting people to pay them as individuals the develop lemmy, while also not being willing to at least be clear about where they stand.

And that's what the donation requests are about. They're not bringing in enough to develop full time. And that's an important thing, having full time developers on a project like this. What they don't seem to get is that they're not just asking us to pay for full time developers, they're asking us to pay them. They aren't figureheads or managers, so it isn't some kind of collective where you can point to other members of the dev team and say "well, maybe those two are unpleasant, but at least the rest aren't bigoted"

Which, afaik, dessalines has never publicly been bigoted. He can be a smug asshole sometimes, but so can I, so there's only so much complaining I can do there. But nutomic is a different issue, and this screen shot perfectly encapsulates how.

Donations would go into both of their pockets for their work, and they do deserve to be paid for that. Even jerks get to make a living. But we all get the choice as to whether or not we're a customer or not. Me? My double digit yearly open source budget is going to people that at least have the sense to have never shot their mouths off with bigoted bullshit. Lemmy is an amazing thing, and the world needs it. I just can't directly support a bigot. I can't, and won't do it.

I wouldn't hire on someone to fix my roof if they had a damn maga hat on, why would I give money to someone that is not only just as much of a bigot, but is also hyper authoritarian? I know hiring someone vs contributing to a project isn't a 1:1 equivalency, but the principle is.

Donations to then also fund .ml. And if anyone wants to donate like that, it's none of my business. It's just important that it be known that you can't donate granularly. You donate, .ml gets some operating costs covered, dessalines gets a chunk, and nutomic gets a chunk.

And that's where this comes from. The discussion in the screen shot is fallout from that. Nutomic still holds the same views they always have, but wants people to ignore that when donating. Which is fine!

As far as defederation goes, all I can say is that, while I have had unpleasant runins with both of them, I've never been permanently banned from .ml, or any of its communities. Individual communities there can, and do, enforce anti-bigotry rules with no interference from admins. But, there are no specific instance rules regarding transphobia in particular.

Again, this is pretty much just added background for anyone that hasn't the time to go digging for the context of the screen shots.

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