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kristina [she/her] @hexbear.net

We should defederate from Lemmygrad.

Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.

Basic synopsis on my feelings here:

  • tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.
  • I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.
  • I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.
  • The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.
  • Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @simply_surprise@lemmygrad.ml, @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml (an admin), @davel@lemmygrad.ml. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.

I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.

I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards

I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.

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101 comments

  • I looked at the source argument. My initial instinct was that maud_dibber, the admin you had a problem with, was not being expressly transphobic or even debatelordy and was coming at you in good faith. Since I'm cis, I didnt want to come at you with that perspective at first, but I ran it by my trans gf and she said she agreed with me. Thats one personal obviously, but full disclosure this girlfriend is a lemmygrad user who will remain anonymous. Maybe its worth considering that trans users of lemmygrad dont feel unsafe with the downvote feature in place like you do? And that its just a difference in culture?

    • He said

      Also, I’m not, and I hope no one else would, go over to hexbear and demand they make changes, and start fights with everyone. We have our own site rules, and one of them is to be respectful to other comrades here. If you can’t disagree without being respectful, we won’t hesitate to issue temp bans.

      I didn't start a fight. I said my piece, and someone came out of the woodwork to debate me. I would like to point out that I was one of many posters that said it was a good idea, and that user chose me, a trans person, to reply to. It is not a good idea to debate someone on their personal experiences of harassment, and removing a potential vector for harassment is good. Another unfun fact, is that this is recurring behavior with this user, where they 'debate' a trans person, make them angry, and demand they be civil. The trans person then gets banned. I'm currently investigating further instances of this, some of which are from other trans hexbear users and even mods of /c/traa.

      The issue is the admin backed up the person doing this bad and transphobic behavior.

      • So, I tried bringing this up with my gf and she got kinda angry and doesnt seem to have much patience for your perspective. She thinks you're ignoring the importance of dialectics and shouldnt have stepped in with your opinion if you weren't prepared to defend it.

        I dont want this to turn this into a proxy fight though (which I'm way to susceptible too) and she doesnt want to hear anymore about this anyway and dont feel comfortable stating opinions from my own angle because it feels like talking over so I'm just going to step out. This isnt a disengage you can still reply I just. Idk I feel very uncomfortable about this and I'm upset both that you're upset and my gf is upset so I need to step back and should probably not have gotten involved.

        • Yeah, the thing is, this kind of harassment has happened at least three times so far. I care more about the trans community than some weird ass transphobia-adjacent admins on an even more niche communist website than hexbear. One big issue with the trans community online right now is that its all on corporate media despite so many of us being socialists. Trans people are more likely to be hyper-online due to how society treats us. This corporate ownership of our spaces leads to unrelenting harassment campaigns against trans people, because it drums up engagement. I don't want to be advocating for people to come here and then they get harassed by some transphobic idiots who somehow got to be mods from lemmygrad. Banning the instigators doesn't do, they're mods and admins. So they need to recognize the problem or get fucked.

          • Going to reply against my better judgement. I am deeply empathically upset that you are upset, but also deeply empathically uspet that my girlfriend is lol, like I said.

            I just think you're being myopic. You've decided, based on lived experience to be fair, that banning downvotes is always better for trans users. And you're stretching people disagreeing with you on that, far beyond the realm of a reasonable response to being disagreed with on something. Like my girlfriend said, if you step into someone else's community to tell them how they should run it, which even CARACOSA agrees we shouldnt have been doing in the first place, then you better be willing to discourse about it. Thinking you get to just say what you feel and then not get any pushback on the issue doesn't make any sense. As someone in there said, its not like you're debating the right of trans people to exist or something where a harsh response to someone disagreeing is actually warranted. You're debating downvotes. I get that our mutual experience as Hexbears have shown us that no downvotes is better for our community, and agree with that. But treating people disagreeing with that as being transphobic or something is a huge reach. Especially when the experience of some of their trans users runs counter to that.

            I've got at least one lemmygrad trans person telling me she disagrees that it would work for lemmygrad, and basically thinks you should stay in your lane. She says the queer specific communities there do not have the problems ours did. Is it so hard to believe that different communities evolved differently?

            I also disagree with you that being able to have polite conversations with comrades (not liberals, as you've written them off as for reasons I dont understand) is "civility fetishism". Hexbear has rules about being nice to other members of this community too. Check how many times a comment has been removed for being hostile.

101 comments