This post is “FYI only” 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 “adult human female” 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 “civil disagreement” 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 “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” 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.
Obviously I’m not on blahaj, but I think the decision is pretty on point for the goals of blahaj.
It also makes me disappointed in feddit.uk. “Leave it to discussion/votes” is bullshit and just support for the behavior.
Edit: The admin responded elsewhere with “we want to make sure we comply with the law”.
My comment remains unchanged. Allowing this is support. Fuck your bullshit law. You’re explicitly supporting this bullshit by your inaction.
Right? Imagine if you said that about the rights for like black women or something? Like, come ON. It’s 2025, we KNOW these behaviors are bigoted, rules are way too chill with letting shit like that fly, and is part of the reason it’s so prolific now - it’s not being treated like the hate speech that it is, and people in power in certain places are like “no I’m not sure we need to discuss it again”. It’s just gross and horrible and makes me feel so fucking helpless sometimes when a space is dominated with shitties like that.
100%.
It’s nothing short of support for the behavior. Its why I constantly comment of Lemmy.world being trash, and why I say 196 mods are garbage and don’t belong on blahaj, long live !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Even suggesting that sort of vile nonsense is worth discussing/voting on makes them bigoted morons.
Edit: Sorry I sound cranky about it, but this “tEaCh tHe CoNtRoVeRsY” garbage puts me in a cranky mood.
“meh, those things sound like work”
– feddit.uk admin
Agreed, fuck 'em.
If the users of feddit.uk want to engage with us, they’re totally welcome to do so on our terms by making an account somewhere that holds their users to a better standard. I hope they do. As far as I’m concerned, the users are cool, but we don’t have to coddle somebody else’s bigotry or put up with hatred.
Removed by mod
Good riddance, fuck TERF island. If communities don’t like this change they can move to an instance that isn’t filled with and supported by transphobes.
deleted by creator
Bubble, echo chamber, besieged fortress syndrome… Combined they make what Ada envisions the blahaj.zone to be.
I mean what the fuck, just ban the person you don’t like.
Agreed. It’s like they want to live in a bubble. Astonishing how the disconnection from reality doesn’t hit them.
you didn’t read shit did you? these folks have the absolute right not to have to constantly argue to justify their existence. until the shit heels of society catch up then they damn right should be in a bubble that those of us who give a damn about human rights are more than willing to respect and protect.
u mad bro?
it’s .ml ofc
Is that a known problem instance?
tankies
Disclaimer: long-time member of lemmy.ml
It’s not really a problem instance for most people, and it’s a pretty diverse one as far as explicitly leftist communities go. It’s the original instance created by the original Lemmy devs, who are openly Marxist-Leninist communists. That’s a big part of how Lemmy has generally remained anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, why it’s not covered with ads and awards and karma gamification and all that junk.
Until the relatively-recent reddit API exodus, the biggest instances were lemmy.ml (general purpose for FOSS tech and left-wing, with all kinds of socialists present), Lemmygrad.ml (Marxist-Leninist-only), and Hexbear.net (dirtbag left). Lemmygrad got a negative reputation among a lot of ex-redditors because of their overall campist, anti-Western positions and critical support of traditional enemies of the US, while Hexbear joined federation later, had built a culture of crass trolling methods to keep visiting conservatives and other capitalists away, and surprised everyone by how large they were, creating an illusion of brigading whenever a post was big enough to get to their front page and gain a sudden influx of Hexbear users mocking them. All three of these communities also had a strict interpretation of anti-bigotry and anti-chauvinism, to the point where echoing a pretty common (albeit unknowingly racist) black-and-white American understanding of countries like Russia and China could be enough to get a ban, leading people used to a pro-Western media bubble to just dismiss these instances as being intolerant echo chambers who ban people for disagreeing, when they were really getting banned for unintentionally and unknowingly being bigoted or spreading misinformation. Hexbear and Lemmygrad have been defederated by a few instances.
Hence, the other reply, just saying “tankies” (a perjorative that can mean basically anything these days).
just curious; did something happen recently because posts from the instance suddenly started appearing on my tl again? didn’t see any other post so i didn’t know if it was a bug or something :)
Yeah, they did a post up clarifying their stance
https://feddit.uk/post/29902751 / https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.uk/post/29902751
yay! ok just making sure :)
Truth be told, I didn’t want to kick off more drama by making a big announcement about it. I respect the stance they’ve taken and the work they’ve put in to it! So we’ve reconnected :)
that makes sense! i just did a double take cause i thought my boost app might have logged out so i had to check <3
hard mode: uk stop being transphobic for two seconds.
What response from an instance admin on this situation would have been expected/acceptable?
Based for defederating from feddit
Cringe for another decision that effects all blahaj users without their consent without posting any proof.
Registration on this instance is clear enough about what this instance is about, and this move is perfectly in line with it. The post isn’t even for you.
deleted by creator
Scrolling through this thread, I don’t see any blahajis with less than full approval. If there are, they are more than welcome to show their disapproval by moving to a different instance.
I appreciate this sort of moderation. Imagine if somehow it was voted down: then people who don’t want to be federated with feddit.uk would have no options. “Posting proof” may have some benefit, but few of us want to tread through more transphobia, so that sounds like a net negative to me.
This is precisely how things should work. Way to go, Ada!
It’s pretty funny watching tourists who aren’t using blahaj (or even feddit.uk) crying out that this doesn’t fit their ideals. This instance is clear about its purpose, and this moderation is perfectly in line with that goal. There’s no need for hypotheticals, because like you said, this was received almost-or-fully unanimously.
Scrolling through this thread, I don’t see any blahajis with less than full approval.
As with all rule changes on blahaj, the consensus comes from the ones who weren’t banned…
What are the odds these “disagreements” are actually just transphobia wearing a mask? Plenty of us disagree with Ada. We’re still here.
Most disagreements are filed under “Gatekeeping” and banned by blahaj admins.
Most Gatekeeping bans are not for Gatekeeping, or for breaking any other rules.
Such deep insights about LBZ from a lemmy.world account! I’d love to see where you pulled these assertions from. Well, I mean unless you pulled them out of your ass of course.
Of course it had to be feddit.uk
They don’t call it TERF Island for nothing.
I think if you want your users to avoid stuff like this you shouldn’t put in a spotlight like you did here.
This is called transparency, not putting it in a spotlight. We don’t close our eyes from the world, we just don’t want to be confronted with hate and discrimination everywhere and have nobody do anything about it. So if drastic actions like this have to be taken to achieve this, it’s good to be informed about that.
Sentiment here seems to be appreciation for the actions taken, so why do you think you can speak for us on this behalf?
I spoke for myself, because i found something weird in the post, what makes you think i spoke for you?
You’re not a lbz user. The user you’re replying to is. This impacts her, not you.
deleted by creator
This is a good move. I’ve reported a lot of tankie-like remarks on feddit that never get their comments removed and it’s concerning. Better to cut off any suspected tankie incubator than suffer the consequences
I’m unsure what tankies really are and why people are so divided on them. Are they transphobic?
Some are, but not most (in my experience).
Way back in the day, the term was used as an insult to describe authoritarian communists. I know anarchists used it.
For today, my understanding is that ‘tankie’ still means authoritarians, but I’ve been seeing a bunch of people use ‘tankie’ as an insult to complain about any leftists.
None of this is at all pertinent to this thread, or to transphobia, or to Ada’s action, so it really didn’t belong here.
I have an irl friend who is a self proclaimed tankie and I don’t really know a ton about it. I’ve asked them before, and their take was “you know how you believe in all the far left freedoms and that stuff and anti billionaire morality? Well I’m like that too and believe it’s basically evil, but I just think it should be enforced with an iron fist and literal tanks. Don’t agree? Doesn’t matter. Fight against it? Dead.”
To my understanding, they very much just don’t believe in giving people the choice because people are stupid as hell and will try to corrupt it with bad faith, and so should be iron fisted in bad faith preemptively. Which, to me, is such an extreme and problematic stance. I just didn’t know if there’s some subtle anti trans stuff as part of being a communist/tankie or what, because when they and I talk politics, we don’t super agree on stuff because they’re kind of a sith absolutist about it.
The “literally tanks” part is where the word “tankie” comes from. So you do actually understand tankies.
I will never side with authoritarianism, because having supreme control over every aspect of life means that whoever has that control can and will abuse it.
I’d rather my comm ban people that complain about ‘tankies’. It’s a useless term which can mean 100 things to different people, only serving really to divide the left.
They just mean anyone who doesn’t blindly trust western propaganda.
No, they mean people who blindly slurp up Chinese propaganda while denying the issues china has.
There’s a very good chance some of the issues you’re talking about are made up western propaganda. We’ve been fed so much bullshit to promote American nationalism and xenophobia.
is this a tankie alt?
Is this a nafo bot?
I’m talking about denying that China is an authoritarian state.
I can’t think of many countries where the workers have more control.
Then you’re not thinking very hard.
Make a post on hexbear or another ‘tankie instance’ about the issues of China in good faith and you will see many posters elucidate the flaws. We say ‘critical support’ for a reason, because we can support an action that may be good in the struggle against imperialism or whatever but still critique the source of that action.
M@te you’re on an anarchist instance. Why are you saying “we” for tankies?
According to most that would use the term disparagingly these days I would be a tankie, so I mean we as in me and other ‘tankies’.
It was a term coined by anarchists to describe authoritarians. You don’t have to accept a label someone else uses in bad faith.
trans women are not women
Wasn’t this a recent court ruling in the UK? Which isn’t great.
I don’t know all of the terminology, but the entire argument over it just seems so stupid, how does letting trans people exist bother you in any way?
One user upset you and the admins didn’t capitulate exactly how you wanted, so you’re defederating… You’re making way more drama out of it than anyone else. How do you handle any sort of difficult situation in your life?
Blahaj doesn’t allow transphobia, period. It is a safe space for those who don’t have anywhere else safe to go on the Fediverse. If an instance refuses to deal with its users being transphobic, then it gets defederated, simple as that. It’s better to defederate from problematic instances than to allow Blahaj’s userbase to have to deal with transphobia, both casual and direct. If its users wanted to be around that, they wouldn’t be on Blahaj. It’s pretty telling that 99% of Blahaj’s vocal userbase is supportive of Ada’s decision here.
The feddit.uk admins failed to remove transphobic nonsense from their instance and went silent when told how and why it was a problem by Ada including violating feddit.uk’s rule 1. Hence, defederation until they get rid of that transphobic nonsense.
They didn’t ban the people on their instance like you wanted so you shut out the entire instance. I love watching “liberals” discover disctorships in their own communities. It’s cute.
Neat opinion. Bye.
This is why no one takes y’all seriously. Expecting every interaction to be perfectly suited to you or you opt out. Guess what, life has adversity. Life has difficulties. But if you shut yourself off from everything that makes you slightly uncomfortable, you’ll never grow and develop as a person.
Who do you mean when you say “y’all”? Either way, I’ve faced enough adversity that I’ve overcome to laugh at your comment, and I bet people reading this have, too. Your comment might make you feel better about yourself, but it has very little to do with the realities of the people reading it. I’m sorry you’re not as insightful as you hoped.
If you keep othering people and making assumptions, you’ll stay as ignorant as you seem. That’s not a very productive way to be. I hope it gets better for you.
“You all”. It’s a gender neutral way to reference people. Are you seriously offended by that too?
Keep being insufferable and wondering why the world doesn’t bend to your will. It’s gonna be a miserable life for you.
you’re making drama
projection, lol
