To be honest we were just getting sick of all the posts complaining about Blajah’s policy of banning folks who they consider to be transphobic from their instance. No pressure was applied from Blajah, we just felt it was the right thing to do. Your whole narrative is bullshit tbh.

You’re running the ‘Are these people are power tripping?’ community in the Fediverse, a community of majority left wing people, and you get a lot of people posting about a single instance, so much so that it dominates the posts to the point that requires moderation intervention.

You can read that in a lot of ways.

One of the ways to read it is that the instance’s admins are power tripping. That doesn’t mean that they’re not trying to create a safe space or that there are not some transphobes. All of these things can be true at once. Some people get caught up in the righteousness of their cause and fail to consider how their actions affect others.

The kind of people you’re talking about are not going to be affected by Blahj defederating feddit.uk. If a person is looking to commit harassment then they’re going to make a new account and no amount of defederation will prevent this (unless Blahj, like Beehaw, goes private) because it is trivial to make an accounts on non-blocked instances.

They don’t need to moderate the entire fediverse, they only need to moderate their communities.

In this situation, what is the goal here? What purpose is served, from the point of view of a Blahj users if another user, who isn’t a Blahj user and isn’t commenting in Blahj communities is banned from a non-Blahj instance? Users can already block instances, communities and individuals on their own. Users can already choose to only see local Blahj communities if they want to ensure that they’re in a safe space and the Blahj admins have full control over the Blahj communities.

The Blahj admin’s opinion doesn’t matter when the topic is a non-blahj user, in a non-blahj community. They’re certainly free to block whoever they want, or not; and federate with who they want to or not.

But, in the context of “Are they power tripping or not”, choosing to defederate an instance simply because an admin brushed them off puts it squarely in the “power tripping” pile. It wasn’t that feddit.uk was suddenly the source of a lot of transphobic attacks, or that they allow bigotry… it was that feddit.uk has different moderation practices then Blahj and refused to change them. It’s petty and power tripping.

Defederation isn’t the tool for this. It’s a low level tool to prevent bad instances, like spam or illegal content, from infecting the rest of the network.

Admins and moderators already have the tools they need to moderate their communities. Instance members who want to stay inside the bubble of increased moderation also have that choice, if a Blahj user clicks ‘Local’ then they will only see communities that are completely under the control and moderation of their local admins. If a user, like the one in the OP, behaves badly then their ban will remove them.

It isn’t the role of an instance admin to moderate all of federated social media. A user can block a community or instance on their own. They do not require an admin to do that for them.

Federation isn’t a moderation tool.

Just because there’s a workaround doesn’t make it not a problem.

It’s like the Right in the US saying ‘Well if you don’t want to be deported, you can just leave’, while technically true… it doesn’t mean that the administration is doing things which are morally defensible.

Safe spaces are not a bad thing. Echo chambers are only echo chambers if the people inside them don’t move in and out as needed. Which at least I do, do. Discussion is good, but it cannot be mandatory, as those who cannot, do not want to, or are not ready to engage in it, can be harmed by it.

Yes, I agree.

If a Blahj user can’t move into an echo chamber (Blahj communities) and out of the echo chamber (the rest of the fediverse) then Blahj is, by this definition, an echo chamber. A single person choosing to remove the option from every Blahj user to leave the echo chamber would be bad.

An example of such a behavior would be if the single person defederated another instance from Blahj, preventing the Blahj users from being able to choose to access the external discussion.

A safe space would be, for example, a Blahj community on a Blahj server. This is a good thing, because it gives people the ability to access a safe space. It becomes a bad thing when that safe space is ran by people who want to isolate their users from the greater social media landscape ‘for their protection’.

Users can choose which communities they subscribe to. Blahj users could choose to avoid Feddit.uk or they could choose to read Feddit.uk. Now they can’t.

According to the Arch Wiki, it’s the driver recommended by NVIDIA and, anecdotally, I was having issues in Wayland and with gamescope/HDR until I switched to the nvidia-open drivers.

Oh yes, very keen of you.

You scrubbed through my post history and found my only post (which I was hiding by mentioning it in my comment in this very thread). Another example of the Blahj admins using ‘transphobic’ like Israel uses ‘antisemetic’, as a cudgel against everyone not towing the party line.

The comment thread started with a person explaining the importance of discussion in winning over allies and avoiding creating an echo chamber. You implied that their suggestion was making trans people less safe.

That does not follow, it isn’t an attempt to address their point. It is a non sequitor.

It is simply changing the conversation topic by accusing the person of a harm in order to make them defend themself rather than addressing the topic at hand (i.e. Creating an echo chamber is bad, conversation is good).

You think a single insult buried in a logical argument disqualifies the whole thing.

You’re not engaging in a conversation. A conversation requires a good faith effort to understand the other side. Using logical fallacies to discredit the other person is not something done in good faith. It isn’t a single insult, it’s the rhetorical tactics that you’re using.

It’s possible that you don’t realize what you’re doing. Maybe you grew up on social media where this kind of thing can appear acceptable (or, at least, gets upvotes because its outrageous behavior).

Or maybe you’re a little older and wiser and know exactly what you’re doing, but think that the ends justify the means. So you’re just getting some good shots in on the other for your side and ignoring the human being on the other end.

Either way, it’s toxic.

Oh yeah, well you’re a Nazi.

Ah.

You don’t need to do any of this.

If your drive is not encrypted, then this won’t save you. It takes time to overwrite files and if your computer were the target of any adversary, they would simply unplug it immediately and then image it.

If your drive is encrypted, then you can just overwrite the headers that contain the key slots. This would take hundredths of a second.

If you can’t understand my point then I’m not going to draw you a picture.

It is content censorship

Exactly.

People treating this like it is justified seem to misunderstand how the federated social media space works.

If the Blahj admins felt that the user wasn’t welcome in their communities then they could ban them. That’s the end of that user.

There is zero reason to contact the admins of another instance.

The reason they’re doing this is because they want to pressure the admins to change their content moderation policy to something that the Blahj admins (I mean Ada) approve of. If the admins feel that it is too onerous to do so, well then they can just apply the Blahj supplied user ban list to automate the process.

So now if Blahj bans you, you’ll get banned by every other instance that they’ve managed to bully and cajole into their censorship network. (This is easy to see, make a new account and get banned from Blahj. Look at your modlog and you’ll see pages of other non-Blahj communities that automatically ban you within seconds).

They don’t want the ability to ban users from Blahj, they want the ability to dictate to other instances which users should be banned. It has nothing to do with creating safe communities, they have all of the tools that they need to do that.

This is the very essence of power tripping.

Ok, if we disregard all of the hyperbole, then it’s very simple.

The admins have the ability to ban the problem user from their communities. If their goal is to protect their communities, then they can ban the user with 3 clicks.

There is zero reason to contact another instance’s admins and even less of a reason to treat being brushed off as an excuse to ban thousands of people on that instance via defederation.

Banning the user would be justified, banning the entire instance is power tripping.

I am suggesting that ad hominem and non sequitors are the tools of non-serious people who are more interested in performative commenting than having a conversation.

Nothing says you’re against murder and erasure like gleefully explaining how you would kill somebody.

PTB

Blahj is a problem instance.

The important distinction here is that they’re not simply trying to moderate their communities. They’re free to moderate their communities for their users. They want to push their rules on other instances.

They’re not free to dictate to the greater social media space the acceptable policies on discourse. Their admins are constantly trying to enforce their ban lists on other servers and communities (or else, you see what happened to feddit.uk).

To see this, go make a new account and get banned from Blahj (you don’t even have to post in their communities, see my PTB post as an example) and you’ll see that 40+ other completely unrelated communities will also automatically ban you. This is the result of their backroom bullying and toxic behavior towards other admins/mods.

It’s easier for an admin or moderator to simply accept their bans than to deal with admins who will take extreme measures, like defederate your entire instance (and lobby others to defederate you) if you don’t accept their dictates.

If their goal is to create an instance with communities for trans people then banning users from their communities would serve their goals.

But, that isn’t what they’re trying to do. This isn’t about creating a safe space, they have all of the tools that they need to make Blahj safe. Blahj users in Blahj communities could have been protected from this problem user by the user being banned.

There’s no need to contact the admins of other instances to ban a user from your instance or from your communities. Trying to bully other instances or communities isn’t required and it is incredibly toxic. Even the moderator here, in this community, has received pressure from Blahj admins about suppressing topics related to Blahj.

Ah yes, the evergreen ‘If you disagree, I’m going to imply that you’re transphobic/against trans people’ argument.

They want to dictate to the admins of other instances which user they should ban as if they’re the sole arbiters of what is or is not ‘transphobic’. That’s the entire issue.

The Blahj admins have been doing this behind the scenes for a while. Go and get banned from a Blahj instance and you’ll a large number of other seemingly random communities will automatically ban you as well (see my post history for a modlog link showing the effect). That’s because these little behind the scenes conversations about ‘transphobia’ happen all the time and many admins or community moderators just give in to the demands because it’s exhausting to have a conversation with these people.

They’re not attempting to solve an issue with a user. They’re trying to throw their weight around and bully admins and moderators into accepting their ban lists.

The Blahj instance takes everything you hate about Reddit power mods and elevates them to federation level. Extreme overreaction, self-righteousness, the ‘If you disagree with me, you’re transphobic’ bullshit and the complete inability to have a conversation with people who disagree with them.

Then they go an make a demand of another instance’s admins, fail to get the result they’re looking for and, lacking the ability to handle conflict resolution or disagreement like an adult, simply defederate the entire instance.

Expecting the entire fediverse to follow their direction on bans for ‘transphobia’ is beyond absurd given how freely they apply that label.

The admins at Blahj are not ‘creating a safe space’, they’re cultivating an echo chamber of toxic behaviors. Being a member of a minority group does not excuse toxic behaviors.

Ah, I see you’ve taken the moral highground.