Update: In light of the programming.dev update here https://programming.dev/post/8399272, the defederation is no longer going ahead.

However, something more needs to be said. Even here on Blahaj, some of our users took issue with the choice to defederate over this issue.

So I would like to give some background and context.

Blahaj Zone exists, because both Kaity and I left mainstream social media to escape transphobia. Reddit, with its lackluster approach to fighting transphobia, and twitter, with its outright celebration of transphobia pushed us here, to the fediverse, and to create Blahaj Zone and Blahaj Lemmy.

To that end, we will continue to treat transphobia seriously. Our goal is to create a space where gender diverse folk can exist and let our defenses down a little, where we don’t have to worry about getting dragged in to an argument with a transphobe, or a bad faith actor “just asking questions”.

If you are looking for a more reddit like experience, where in the interest of increased engagement, we let low level transphobia slide, and push responsibility for dealing with it on to community mods and individual users, then you will likely not be happy with blahaj going forward. If you choose to stay here, understand that we may defederate again in the future over similar issues.

The choice is yours.

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It has recently been brought to my attention that the lead admin of programming.dev is engaging in ongoing transphobia.

You can see the conversation in question here https://programming.dev/comment/6131539

For that reason we will be defederating from programming.dev in 48 hours.

There are only three communities on that instance used by small number of our users, so this won’t have a big impact, but if you are one of those users, you will need to use an alt account on another instance if you wish to access the communities.

  • @[email protected]
    1•10 months ago

    I guess my concern is that as a user who created their account on programming.dev, it feels like it’s coming out of nowhere. I like browsing the communities here, I hadn’t seen the original post on the other instance before this thread, and if I had missed this thread this whole instance would just disappear seemingly randomly.

    I’m a programmer by trade and by hobby so when creating my account I went with “the programming instance.” Now I’m hearing that because of a thread on a different instance (lemmy.ml) this instance is defederating with programming.dev.

    I get that you can migrate to another instance, but if decisions on defederation can be made based on the actions of one person this could definitely happen again, and I don’t make a habit of following an instance admin to make sure I agree with everything they say. It seems exhausting and unsustainable to constantly check other instances for inter-instance conflicts just to see the communities I like/want to be a part of