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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.

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).

MeanwhileOnGrad @sh.itjust.works
cm0002 @lemmy.world

Ig Nutomic really hasn't changed his stance on their infamous DM and this time, it was on a public thread
FediLore + Fedidrama @lemmy.ca
cm0002 @lemmy.world
CW: References to Transphobia

In 9 months since the 0G post and DM came to light, Nutomic hasn't truly changed their stance on the infamous DM and only offers token "corporatized" apologies at best
123 comments

    • defederating from instances you don’t like

      And that's where you lost me since I made this post highlighting a problem with management of the server expressing harmful transphobic sentiment and now you are trying to make it out like these are petty personal opinions.
      \ We've defederated from servers which allow or don't care about transphobia already, feddit.uk is an existing example. The fact that you are dismissing the problem like this shows you don't understand why we have such hostility towards transphobic sentiment or just don't care.

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

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I saw this earlier in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and it's pretty bad. I'm in favor of defederation, at the very least to help cut some of .ml's network effect on the Fediverse. Since many of their communities are insanely large and they're also very well known for banning people for let's just say less than justified reasons. Nutomic's transphobia is really the last straw in my opinion. If people are interested in looking for alternative to popular .ml communities, !de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone is a good place to look.

    I don't think anyone needs to stop using or break away from Lemmy like people say. Lemmy is open-source and can easily be forked. Lemmy's devs don't have the authority to deny people from using Lemmy either. Instances operate independent of them, and since many instances are already here and using Lemmy, switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.

    • I agree with you but I do want to clarify this point.

      switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.

      Since Lemmy uses the underlying ActivityPub protocol you can use something completely different and it is compatible. For example in response to this latest drama with Lemmy devs I switched to fedia.io, which is running on Mbin and not Lemmy. Mbin is compatible with Lemmy because Mbin also uses ActivityPub. The compatibility happens on a protocol level not the service level. You can go search up Mbin magazines (which is essentially the same thing as a community) and interact with the same way as you would with a Lemmy community. You can't set up a community on an Mastodon instance because it doesn't have that functionality but you can theoretically comment in Lemmy and Mbin communities thanks to the ActivityPub. You can also use Piefed as it fills the same social media niche. The platforms that are incompatible would be platforms that are not using ActivityPub.

      Instance owners can't just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it's not that simple. But for the average user you can create an Mbin account and as long as the instance is federated with all the instances your Lemmy account was then you can subscribe to all the community you were subscribed to before and the only functional difference in your daily usage is the sorting algorithm (. For instance owners the only possible solution may to be have a migratory period where you have two instances running, so people could slowly transition from one instance to another but looking at how hard it was to get people to move from Reddit I think moving instances is a whole other topic.

      I'm not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won't be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.

      • Instance owners can’t just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it’s not that simple.

        That was really my whole point, since the databases aren't compatible. A switch from Lemmy to something else would reboot the instance completely. But also it's not necessary for instances that aren't lemmy.ml. Maybe some instances out there are loyal to .ml but that doesn't mean all of them are. This one certainly isn't and neither is my main one dbzer0.

        I’m not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won’t be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.

        That's good, I see a surprising amount of people saying that users and instance owners should switch to piefed or mbin over this as a form of "boycott" which I think is dumb because we don't have any onligation to give money to the devs, to support them, or even to federate with them. This instance banned nutomic for his transphobic rhetoric, and quokk.au defederates all of .ml as a whole.

  • lemmy devs being bigoted it's more likely than it think

    i really wish there was a valid lemmy alternative software or wish postmill implemented atproto or ap :(

  • This is one of the major reasons I’m supportive of Beehaw migrating platforms

    Edit: didn’t realize which com this was on

    • Beehaw users and communities always give me good vibes. Even before I looked the instance up and saw that good vibes are its thing. And if that entire instance left Lemmy, I think that would be pretty sad because we need all of the good vibes and good people around here that we can get.

  • Yes. There should be no handwringing over this. If admins/mods for an instance are bigoted, fash, or other such things then they deserve to get defederated as they will allow many bad things and spread their hate. It is best to isolate them as they want to spread their hate and convert more people, that's their entire goal.

  • I never really liked his ideas, trans-related or not, but why the hell was he saying all of that just for a (presumably) message about a Firefox plugin???????

  • Admin Ping for @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone to weigh in on this issue with her thoughts and opinions on the matter.

    • Nutomic was banned from this instance approximately 9 months ago when I first become aware of his stance. However, it's not something I plan on defederating over unless it becomes clear that the instance as a whole is not acting on transphobic content or unless it becomes clear that the community strongly believes that we should defederate.

      • Yeah that's why I decided to make the thread sooner rather than later. I wanted to get the community's opinions on it and see what they think. I do think there is the risk of Nutomic and others refusing to action transphobic rhetoric similar to his own if it seems "respectful" and "logical".

123 comments