Blahaj Lemmy Meta

I've been building and nurturing communities online and offline for decades now. So when Kaity and I were creating the guidelines for this instance, I knew upfront that there would be guidelines, not rules. And that reason for that is because the rules aren't the source of truth on what's acceptable and what isn't. Rules are attempt to codify and communicate what is acceptable, but they get treated as if they are what is acceptable.

If I had a situation where someone needed to be removed from the community, but they technically weren't breaking the rules, then the rules are the problem. They don't get to stay just because the rules didn't capture that specific scenario. But changing rules brings about confusion and contention, because people think it means what is acceptable has changed, when in reality, they just had a mistaken understanding of what is acceptable, because the rules were centered as the source of truth.

It also creates a lot more work on moderators and volunteers, because they have to turn in to mini lawyers, and their actions become shaped by the rules, again, giving the rules first place in what is ok and what isn't, when they should never be that, because they never can be that. Rules are always imperfect.

And so, guidelines. Guidelines get to the heart of it, because they don't attempt to define every scenario that is and isn't acceptable. Instead, what they do is let people know the lens through which decisions about moderation are made. I acknowledge that that means some level of ambiguity. However, there is ambiguity with rules too, we just pretend/forget that there isn't. But with guidelines, it's easy to address the ambiguous scenarios and uncommon cases, because the guidelines for dealing with them are simple.

Transphobes getting mad and sealioning about "rules" is not pointless drama because it accomplishes the goal of keeping those people out.

Literal rules can be designed or twisted to undermine the fundamental goals of those rules. It creates lawyers focused on rhetoric over morals; lawyers trying to find a way to get away with the very things the rules were supposed to prevent. Words have no meaning so long as they can be abused to accomplish what they want. This is how fascism is so easily able to overtake liberal democratic systems and how powerful interests rig the state in their favor.

Anyhow, most of the drama comes from people like you who care more about semantics than having queer people feel safe and secure. If you want to help banned transphobes overcome their bigotry, find a way where you can do that off blahaj. That's how you can actually achieve your goals without relying on Ada to do it. When many of them inevitably refuse to change, then you can feel secure in knowing that most of this "drama" is bad faith bigotry. Complaining here is a waste of effort for accomplishing what you supposedly want.

I think your post is creating pointless drama.

I think the mods are doing just fine, and keeping it free and loose instead of bogged down with concrete legalese-esque rules makes for a good vibe. It seems like "don't be a dick" is pretty much the stance and I'm all for it.

i've been here since almost when it was created and never once had any issues. it's not hard to not be a terrible person that respects everybody they encounter :)

I disagree completely

Principles are always better than rules.

Rules are inflexible, and lead people into thinking that there's ways around them, that you can game the system because the rules aren't written that way. It also leads to thinking that if it isn't a rule, you can do it.

Guiding principles are flexible, more enduring. But they take more work on the part of the people handling situations as they arise.

A set of principles, with examples, tends to work much better long term.

Otherwise, you just keep stacking rules. You stack rules high enough, nobody can remember them all, and they topple.

Besides, ain't nothing about lemmy fully democratic. At some point, someone is handling the hardware and keeping the connection alive. Whoever that happens to be is the one that has to carry the weight of decisions, even if there's an illusion of collaboration. Maybe if society as a whole gets rebuilt, it could be fully community run, but I tend to believe humans suck at that once the group gets over about a dozen people, so I'm dubious something as big as an instance is ever gong to actually function without an organizer (be that a smaller group or an individual).

But, here, now, on this instance, it's working very well. It weeded out folks that didn't agree with the principles as explained. It made a clear line to anyone not on the instance, and it is definitely known that those principles are not to be fucked with

That seems like a highly successful forum to me.

Who cares about external criticism at all? Even internal criticism is of dubious value when the goal is a protected community. Hell internal and external validation is of dubious value. What matters is that things work. And they do. Very, very well.

The whole idea that someone banned for transphobic activity needs a personal explanation is, frankly, malarkey. Blahaj ain't about the folks that aren't on board with the goals. That's the only explanation needed: you done fucked up, bye.

You know the idea of "It isn't my job to educate you"? It's part of every marginalized group's evolution. At some point, it isn't the black person's job to educate white people about their lived experience. It isn't the gay man's job to explain to the straights what gay culture is, and why they have a right to exist.

It isn't the admins' job to educate any of us. Their job is keeping things running, and keeping the space one that folks can just be in.

Rules. Rules. They're fine for some things. I don't think they're useful here.

Which, please note that my statement of external validation being of dubious value applies to this entire comment.

But, for me, I see what they're doing here, and it's beautiful.

trolls aren't going to not troll just because there are well defined rules, in fact in can have the opposite effect, trolls using the rules as a weapon in their trolling.

in some of your comments you talk about checks and balances in terms of governance. well lemmy is not a democracy plain and simple, server owners have full control, and this is a feature not a bug. having full control means that you can abuse your power sure, but echo chambers aren't fun without people to troll, and the open nature of the fediverse means people will go wherever they like best. and for what it's worth the vibe here is better than anywhere else on lemmy in my experience.

and as for your last point, this space is not intended for transphobes to better themselves, it is meant as a place for trans people to feel safe. if a troll comes here and betters themselves somehow, great, but that's not the goal of this place. we're here because we're sick of having cis het normative being the standard, and we wanna be ourselves, not conform to the straights and what they want us to be.

Other users have already opined my thoughts on the subject, so Ill just simply say Ada is doing a great job and should not change it.

However, this post and the comments by OP are weird. I spend WAY too much time on lemmy, and Ive seen every single post on blahaj in the past 6months (excluding ones i probably missed because they got deleted) and read a good amount of the comments, along with reading a lot of posts from federated instances. And yet I dont see the problem that OP is describing. And it makes me wonder what OP would gain from this, why would they so vehemently go out of their way for this, create a potentially (or at least, in a different community I have blocked) false narrative for this?

The things that jump out to me first are they either want rules so they can skirt them and say "but i didnt technically break any rules!" Or it is because theyve been banned and salty about why. If either case is the true motive, maybe just dont interact with blahaj? I dont speak for everyone, but I dont care about someone who can technically not break any rules but still be a purposeful nuisance, or some transphobe who pretends to be nice. I used to tell people online I was a cis woman, but I found that to be a mistake. It had people treat me properly, but I ended up being around people who were treating me fine, but were transphobes I only found out later. I do not want to be around these people.

I can never stress in strong enough terms how far outside of “Blahajism” my entire life has been… but even I can grasp that Ada’s house has Ada’s rules. (Whether they be opaque or not). If I don’t agree I have two options: shut the fuck up or leave.

If you struggle / have issues with recent pronouns then, I don’t know, perhaps just refer to people by name? It’s not rocket surgery.

I strongly believe that drama only exists where people want drama to exist. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that the majority of Blahajists have more than enough (unwanted and unwarranted) drama in their day to day lives just trying to exist. I think these folk deserve a bit of peace and quiet - especially in their own backyard.

Should I ever get banned for bumping my gums too loudly then I’ll just move on (sadly) and file it under “life lessons”.

I'm not sure I get your logic for how transphobes wouldn't be transphobic if they understood the rules. Anti-lgbt behavior is very clearly listed as an example of not okay behavior within the guidelines. This is a safe space and anyone who needs to read some comprehensive incredibly detailed ruleset to act cordial won't read that ruleset in the first place. The guidelines as is seems to work just fine with only transphobes complaining as far as I can tell.

I think the rules here are just fine. If I were to to sum it up, just don't be bigoted towards minority people. I don't get how that is difficult to grasp.

If you clicked your way onto this specific community, you would had have to have atleast some knowledge of the the LGBTQ+ community, how to treat them etc.

The guidelines aren't hard to grasp either, first they ask you to have empathy for minority groups, so that right there is telling you that you need to have some kind of understanding for minorities, where they come from, and what they might expect from others. Such as being called the correct pronouns.

Even if you didn't know ahead of time, you could always ask and listen. Do some research, right? the internet can be used as a research tool?

The inclusion and acceptance part of the guidelines, Is so clear however, I don't think it needs more explaining, 'don't be bigoted' is so common place Lemmy, let alone the Fediverse. Which is why it just seems to me, that if you made your way to this server that you should know what is expected, or at the least, you should know to not treat minorities badly, because these types of guidelines are such common place on Lemmy. Even on Reddit, this isn't exactly an unknown concept.

Another way to look at the blahaj guidelines,

Not all laws are strictly like one way rules, hadn't you ever heard of vague laws op? I might be stretching it, but vague laws happen to act more like guidelines in practice. So even these government laws that you are using for your perceived benefit for your push of change, doesn't 100% align with your claims and what you are wanting from the mod team of this instance.

In most cases I know laws are more like rules, but vague laws do exist. What the mods are presenting are like vague laws. But really, most of it is really just common sense, just put two pieces to the puzzle together it's easy to avoid doing the wrong thing. Most of the puzzle is already in front of you, and then you just use some common sense thinking, and research.

With anything that isn't 100% definent, you need to look at the road before you cross, you need to read signs, you need to research what they are telling you is expected, as is written. This interpretation, that is open up is really just, a common sense view where they can just look at a given scenario and just moderate based on that.

The problem with defining the rules rigidly, is that it ties the mods hands when a bad actor starts doing stuff that while technically is within the rules, is still bad faith.

Its not that hard to fit within the guidelines.

To be honest this sounds similar to a critique that general laws are weak because they rely on the subjective evaluation of judges.

For example, the famous quote "I know it when I see it" by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice on the threshold of what is obscenity.

Just as we rely on judges to interpret laws and apply them fairly and reasonably, we rely on moderators to be reasonable in how they enforce the rules.

Like obscenity, it is hard to capture a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that can define transphobia or homophobia.

Even if we tried to come up with a long list of rules to create more transparency, there is a principle of good legislation that "hard cases make bad law," meaning laws should intentionally be written in a general way aimed at the average case, and not written based on exceptional cases.

While it might feel more transparent to engage in making many explicit rules to cover every case of what is transphobic and bannable, it might also just make a mess and add no clarity.

In our case we would not want to write rules that cover every exceptional way that transphobes might behave that might get them banned, especially if doing so makes it harder for moderators to ban transphobes.

Instead it is better to have a single, simple rule that bans transphobia and let the moderators make judgements about what counts.

That said, I understand the desire for transparency - I wouldn't mind if there were something separate from the rules that illustrate some examples of behavior that would be considered rule violations, much like how famous cases help set precedent and create a kind of record of how judgements have happened in the past and so you can get a sense of how the rules will be applied to future behavior.

But I believe the moderator logs are already open, and it sounds like you already knew the people who were banned and were complaining were transphobes - which I assume you know by looking at the modlogs or by their behavior.

So, is the issue that the transphobes were not obviously transphobes to others (so they pulled the wool over the eyes of others)? Is the idea that making more salient what they were banned for would help with this situation?

Uh dude you're supposed to code your speech for diatribes like this