Ada

I understand your position, and that it makes sense to you. I personally feel that there is a degree of overreach involved when action is taken based on behavior that happens outside of an instance

Let me challenge that. The issue isn’t where they gatekeep, it’s the fact that they do it at all. People willing to explicitly and deliberately undermine gender diverse folk when these conversations come up are a problem if our users can just stumble across them. It doesn’t matter where the user is posting, if they’re not banned, their content can and will be seen by blahaj users.

And trying to escape that shit is why so many of us have left twitter, reddit, tumblr and other centralised social media sites that just don’t give a shit about transphobia. The users here come here precisely because that shit is stomped out when it’s found.

Giving people a free pass because they post outside of blahaj communities just makes the overall experience similar to a mini reddit or twitter or facebook. Individual users have to each encounter the bigot, and then block them. Each of them exposed to the bigotry first.

And I appreciate that some queer folk want that experience. And that’s the power of federation. They can be on an instance that doesn’t react the way blahaj does. But many folk don’t want to see that shit at all. They don’t want to stumble across gatekeepers and bigots and people willing to actively deny them their own identity. And that’s what blocking folk at the instance level does. They don’t need to see the shit first before they can block it. Much of it is gone before it ever crosses folks feeds.

There is no power tripping in this approach. It is a very considered and deliberate approach that lets us avoid defederation of whole instances. Folk who don’t want that experience are welcome to host their user accounts on other instances, whilst still joining in with our communities. Or host accounts on our instance and other instances like many folk do.

There is no plan to control what people see here. Just an approach that gives a vulnerable community the option of a relatively bigotry free feed.

Thanks again for engaging

Right back at you :)

I just want to clarify. The only people getting banned for remote comments are people who knowingly and explicitly gatekeep other folks identity in response to this topic coming up. They are banned so that they don’t start appearing in blahaj communities with the very people they’re invalidating.

To me, there’s no difference. If someone’s response to this topic coming up is to double down on gatekeeping, it doesn’t make them any less harmful just because they did it outside of a blåhaj community.

Do not confront the people doing bad things

That’s not the rule. The rule is don’t misgender them.

If you can’t use their pronouns or otherwise interact with them without invalidating their identity, then, you aren’t to interact with them.

The only people who were banned were gatekeeping other folks identities. If you find an example of someone that was banned who didn’t do that, I will unban them.

If you find that inconsistent or confusing, I’m not sure what to tell you…

If someone back then was banned for gatekeeping or misgendering and won’t do that anymore, not only will they not be banned in “retaliation”, their banned account will be unbanned. All they need to do is reach out to me

If someone back then was banned for gatekeeping and misgendering, but didn’t do those things, not only will they not be banned in “retaliation”, their banned account will be unbanned. All they need to do is reach out to me.

If someone back then was banned for gatekeeping and misgendering and they don’t reach out to me, I still I won’t ban their new account if I become aware of it, because the point of all of this is to make it clear that gatekeeping and misgendering are not on. If they’re not doing that on their second account, their second account won’t get banned, because the first ban achieved its purpose.

tl;dr - Whoever they are, if they’re not gatekeeping and misgendering folk, they’ll be fine.

So what about all the people who were banned from blahaj back in december for dissent?

No one was banned for dissent. People were banned for gatekeeping, misgendering and repeatedly and/or deliberately misgendering folk.

Most people who were banned for “Gatekeeping” then and since then were really just banned because the admins didn’t like them despite them dispite not breaking rules.

The rule is don’t misgender and gatekeep other folks and block or ignore them if you can’t deal with their identity or pronouns. The modlog is right there. If you can find a single instance of someone getting banned without breaking that or another rule, I want to know about it