ada

ada, 2 years ago

I’m an admin for a relatively busy instance, so I see all of the bigotry, and there is more of it than I’m comfortable with :\

There’s a lot of bigots out there that have moved over from reddit.

ada, 2 years ago

A little, but most of it isn’t even targeted at our users. Lots of the stuff I see is just stuff reported by our users, in communities that have nothing to do with us specifically.

ada, 2 years ago

It’s interesting, we’ve got blahaj.zone itself, and even though it doesn’t have as many users as our lemmy instance, we’re lucky if we see a report every couple of days over there.

The microblogging fediverse is more aggressively opposed to queerphobic bigots I think, so they never get a chance to take root over there, but here on the threadiverse, lots of them fly under the radar of admins that aren’t the targets of their bigotry

ada, 2 years ago

I mean, that’s the selling point of this instance. We are aggressively protective of the queer community. I explicitly aim to cut the toxicity off at the source rather than forcing each of our users to react to it after they see it. The wall is there to ensure we can exist without having to be on guard all of the time, and the HOA stuff is often driven by people who don’t care if we’re on guard, or actively want us to feel unsafe

ada, 2 years ago

Do you think lemmy/kbin’s relatively poor and insufficient moderation tooling is partly to blame for what you’re seeing?

Not as such. The moderation tools lead to redundant handling, and make it easy to miss reports you shouldn’t miss, and force you to leave reports open so that others don’t miss them, but the actual number of reports is more of a cultural thing than anything else.

Do you think that the communities based structure make this sort of thing more likely to be bad or problematic?

So, the microblogging fediverse (which I’ll call microfedi) existed for years before twitter crapped the bed. It housed queer folk who had left main stream social media, and those queer folk set the culture and ran the instances. So when twitter happened, even though the culture changed, there was a sufficient mass of existing instances to ensure that bigots remained unwelcome in the mainstream fediverse.

However, when reddit crapped the bed, by comparison, the threadiverse basically didn’t have an established culture. There was a handful of lemmy instances (we were one of them), but the only one of notable size was lemmy.ml. kbin didn’t even exist in any meaningful way until a couple of months before reddit died.

So, when reddit died, there was no established culture. Instead, people brought reddit culture with them, and reddit culture, because of lax admins, was much more tolerant of hate speech than microfedi. And so, people who are “reddit people” more than “fediverse people” set up lemmy and kbin instances, and brought those reddit norms with them.

So then, you get instances like blahaj and beehaw that are threadiverse instances, but have the “old school” microfedi approach to bigotry. We smash it down hard at the first hint of seeing it, but most of the instances we federate with don’t attack it so aggressively.

And thus, on microfedi, much of the work is done by remote admins before I ever see it, but on the threadiverse, it’s often just not done by remote admins (unless it’s aggressively hateful), and that means I end up seeing a lot of shit, and blocking a lot of users that wouldn’t have had a chance to get established in the microfedi universe

ada, 2 years ago

So honest question.

Lets say someone comes along and says “Woman are adult human females”. A trans person reports this and tells you that it’s a dog whistle, and the person saying that is a TERF.

What would you do?

ada, 2 years ago

And that’s kind of what I mean.

To any trans person, that phrase is a klaxon. It’s an alarm bell that tells us the person we’re talking to is actively transphobic.

So we report it, the mod or admin who isn’t trans feels out of their depth, the trans person doesn’t have the spoons to explain it, and the transphobe stays in place, now empowered to keep their transphobia going, as long as they keep it at the level where most admins and mods don’t recognise it.

And that’s what the threadiverse feels like now.

But on microfedi, there is a much greater awareness of these things, and someone saying that would be dropped or defederated from most instances very quickly

ada, 2 years ago

My mum wasn’t racist. She’s the one who helped me see that racism isn’t just the way things are. But everyone else in my family, in my town, in the media… It was everywhere…