this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Oh god … this happened?!
non-trans person sharing their perhaps invalid and uninformed opinions
As someone who was calling for easing up on dogpiling on nutomic in that thread, banning beaver here, and the instance, is IMO not ok, at all.Nutomic, you were probably pissed off about the leaking, I think most would get that. But as an admin here and a core dev, I think you have to do way way better than use your admin rights here as a weapon against someone you no longer like and who posted on another instance. If you think there’s a situation to sort out, it’s gotta be done more openly than this.
Rule 1 of this instance (against transphobia) probably applies.
As in, this moderation action was likely against instance rules. How else is a minority community to combat their oppressors than post about what ever communication they receive? To punish them for that communication however inappropriate it would have been from a less oppressed person is therefore punishing them and then coming under rule 1.
There were plenty of other ways to handle this. Banning a user looks a lot like petty and unreliable admin-ing. Especially when the issue of whether you are a transphobe is on the table and instead of addressing that you’ve chosen use your power against the transgender community here.
I get that leaking personal chats is always a dodgy thing, but in this case, I really hope the lemmy ml admins sort this out.
It’s really bad to weaponise admin powers against an oppressed minority. Certainly makes me question my membership here and the admins values. And is a particularly bad look for an instance many are criticising for having power crazy admins, most of which is red scare crap but totally justified in this case I suspect.
[I'm neither transgender nor a tankie, but instead just a rando browsing "all" who has no dog in this fight (aside from a general preference toward egalitarianism and against bigotry). I'm only commenting because this appears to be starting to spill over into issues that are relevant to the Fediverse at large.]
Hell no, not even a little bit! There's no such thing as "leaking" a PM* because the recipient has the right to publicize it! It's fucking nuts to send a message to somebody -- especially one that pisses them off -- and then expect them to keep it secret for the sender's benefit. If the sender doesn't like it, his recourse is to not fucking send the message in the first place!
The notion that the recipient of a PM has any kind of obligation toward the sender is the dumbest fucking thing I've read on this site in a while, and that's saying a lot since I've been reading about Trump and shit. Actually going so far as to ban somebody for a reason so pants-on-head moronic is absolutely beyond the pale.
By the way, I'm assuming that you (@maegal) are saying things like "I get that leaking personal chats is always a dodgy thing" because you're trying to be charitable to better persuade Nutomic. If you actually believe that nonsense, then you need to get your head screwed on correctly, too.
(* unless somebody hacks the server to obtain PMs that he wasn't a party to, which I assume is not what we're talking about here.)
I don’t think we’re that far off from each other.
In saying “always a dodgy thing” I meant something closer to “always potentially” where obviously it depends with transphobic messages being a relevant example.
That being said, I think this is a scenario where people will naturally differ in their expectations. “Obligation” as you put it is a very strong word and nothing like what I was alluding to. But I think many would subscribe to the idea that direct messages are a relatively protected space. Some less so. All with exceptions and “lines” that probably differ too. I briefly asked someone I consider more ethical than me, and they were probably more inclined to think of DMs as protected than me. Obviously no excuse for abuse, but presumed private.
I also suspect that there are generational differences here too. Older people whose Internet lives precede facebook’s push toward merging real and online life might have a greater inclination toward expecting privacy online.
In this particular case, it was clearly devs/mods talking shop, so clearly less of a public discussion. But you never know. Maybe nutomic felt like they could share their more speculative “theories”without worrying about coming off as crazy. Dunno.
Personally, I’d like a culture where DMs are presumed protected and private. But maybe that’s just me.
I swear, petty and vindictive banning is far worse on Lemmy than it ever was on Reddit, and particularly on ML instances.
If I were to indulge in a bit of armchair psychology, I'd say it is a side effect of venerating authoritarianism.
Maybe it's worse on ML instances. I honestly would start explaining it by looking at how much red-scare crap they go through.
But generally, I think you're right ... I've seen ban-happy mods too, and not on ML instances.
I'd say it's people learning how to manage decentralisation/federation. It gives people a greater sense of ownership and power and so you get some power tripping and a new source of drama and identity politics (based on instances). Kinda sad actually.
Fair point -- having power decentralized certainly makes it more common for individual actors to act unilaterally in this way. However, in my experience the most egregious examples have been users being banned from Lemmy.ml for simply expressing a contrary opinion in a non-aggressive manner.
For a community that is so actively political, the tolerance for an open exchange of views is surprisingly low.
I'm not over much of that activity, but I think the more accurate way to think about it is that they're actively communist, and actively critical of the west and its imperialism/captialism. So they're coming from a pretty different perspective than middle/centrist westerners and find some of the presumptions/beliefs of westerners outright awful lies. Whatever the truth is, they're not trying to run a perfectly open forum to try to convince everyone of communism, when it comes to politics that is. So anything that starts with a critical view of China is immediately viewed suspiciously and likely to get moderated (depending I'd say). I understand how many would find that problematically censorial. Thing is though that they hold a minority position that tends to piss a lot of people off, so a good amount of defensiveness is just a natural consquence I'd say. In my experience, the worst part about their communist beliefs have been all of the loud anti-communists they've triggered.
Yeah, that would definitely explain the hypersensitivity when it comes to any criticism of China or the USSR, valid or otherwise.
It still strikes me as counter-productive, though, as there are many people on Lemmy who have capitalism-critical views who could be persuaded to shift further left or become more interested in socialist causes. Banning them, or censoring them, or labelling them as idiotic liberals, only serves to undermine that endeavor. Socialism is dying fast enough in the west as it is.
Hexbear is 100% the safest for trans people on the fediverse, I definitely suggest heading there if you want a safer place. Its admin'd by a lot of trans people and has an extremely active trans community with thousands of comments and messages per day
I'm on lemmy.ml because I like checking all trans spaces on the fediverse, but obviously with a transphobe in charge that makes that harder. Of course, that also means wading through a lot of horseshit from transphobic trolls, which I'm hoping to help with