Personally the sooner we rip off that bandaid, the better. .ml is far from the only activity pub project out there, but they are absolutely one of the most toxic forces on the fediverse and seriously harm the on boarding experience for new users. Nutomic is a bigot and a liar and Dessalines is a cringe keyboard warrior and nobody would put up with them if they weren’t writing code. But if Lemmy is no longer the only mature option for federated social media, why should we continue to tolerate their shit?

I think this is an inconsistent move from the Blahaj team. They defederated feddit over one transphobic user who the admins wouldn’t deal with. And I agree with that decision. They should make the same decision here. If lemmy.ml won’t ban Nutomic, then it’s clear they aren’t interested in creating a safe environment for trans people.

Regardless of any funding question, I think every instance should be questioning federation with .ml over their acceptance of Nutomic. And that goes double for any instance committed to inclusivity, because they have a responsibility to their users to uphold the values those users expect.

Well said. Ada’s stance is reasonable, and whoever keeps bringing this up should consider taking a trip to their account settings and blocking users, communities and instances to their hearts’ desire instead of pressing others to do it for them.

Nutomic is banned from blahaj anyway.

Your entire opinion is null and void when you don’t even get the nuances of why they would even start to express their support for Russia in the Ukrainian war, you just assume they like totalitarianism, incredible attitude

I halfway agree with you, the first part at least: I don’t mind if people have opinions I think are wrong or stupid. It is fine. Unpopular opinion, I also think letting nutomic have some kind of transphobia and talk about it is fine. The alternative is that every opinion that someone thinks is “incorrect” gets driven underground where no one talks about it, and so anyone who does hold that view can’t really have a conversation about it or learn where and how exactly they are wrong. It just festers, and eventually they find more people who also think that way, and none of them talk about it in public because they’ve learned not to. It’s just a stupid cultural feature.

This stance does make it kind of silly that Ada defederated from some other server because of one random user on there, saying that if the admins won’t ban that user then how can she protect her users against ever seeing someone with a wrong opinion, and so bang, defederation. For some reason, the exact same logic does not apply to lemmy.ml even though the one random user in this case is also an admin. Who knows. But anyway, for my opinion she is making the right call in this case, and made the wrong call in the previous one-random-user case.

To me, the great sin of .ml isn’t their bad opinions, although they are very bad. It is that they are unapologetically heavy-handed about manipulating the conversation to require their users to hold those opinions also. That to me is terrible. It’s dishonest. It’s like sending fake votes out into the network, it’s like editing people’s comments after they write them. It’s just wrong. I think someone who takes that attitude towards other people’s communications has no place on a shared network where we cooperate to get communication done, and the fact that those other people have accounts on their server and so “belong to them” or whatever doesn’t in any way excuse it.

I don’t know what’s in their heads that they think “these users are ours, so we can do what we like with their content” is reasonable. Also, to be honest, I don’t know why people put up with it. I think the propaganda that recasts it as “defending the space” from bigotry or Western propaganda has a lot to do with it, sort of putting up a distorted reality where what they are doing is actually some other, unrelated, thing, and so people look at it in that light instead. I don’t know.

Anyway, I sorta agree with you on the main thing. nutomic holding opinions I think are wrong isn’t a crisis. People can think what they want as long as they’re honest about it and let other people be honest about it too. That’s my feeling.

Personally, I don’t care that they are communists. A lot of it is just that they’re dicks. I would feel almost the exact same way if they were MAGA people, or pro-Nancy Pelosi people, or for that matter Bernie Sanders people or just non-political people, that harassed and banned and mocked anyone who disagreed with them in the same way that .ml does.

I’ve only ever seen one comment from nutomic cited as evidence of transphobia. And its a DM responding to some mystery comment that is never posted alongside it. A bit suspicious when the only evidence is presented without context.

Though it does contain the transphobic dogwhistle, “biological man,” but that term is also one a reasonable person could reasonably reach from a place of ignorance. He also admitted to knowing very little about trans issues.

Also the trans comments are just one in a list of things. Without context there’s no way to know if those even are his own ideas, or a summery of the mystery comment he’s responding to, but also clearly disagrees with.

The opposition to nutomic on the basis of transphobia feels very much like a witch hunt. This doesn’t seem like strongly held anti-trans beliefs. People are occasionally wrong or misinformed about things. And that’s okay!

Edit: misremembered the specific language in the quote

The liberals

People who use the word “liberal” as a slur like this are some of the worst people on this planet.

People at home will moan about fascists and loss of their illusory freedoms at home, cheering when communists gain traction in other states, talking big about revo while the wolf is at their door, and 100% fling open the windows and invite in the fascist fox for cuddles and Netflix.

Drag got banned for sharing a message in which the admin promised to stop harassment. Drag thought the admin had kept the promise and was showing proof of it. But in fact, the admin had broken the promise, and banned drag, because she thought drag was trying to call her a liar.

Wouldn’t have happened if the admin had just stopped the harassment.

mild criticism

You misspelled “totally innocent unrelated comment which stepped on some kind of weird and arbitrary rule which they will swear is hateful and proof you are a bad person on purpose, BAN!”

Nice and all, but how is this relevant?

I’m surprised to see this many people think the same as me. They are way too strict and full of censorship. Saying anything will get you flagged as transphobic, even if you’re just politely debating about a subject you want to get informed about.

“You should have known” - “you’re just transphobic”

blahaj.zone is an insult to the LGBT

What if the causation is the other way around from how you think it is?

One of the head honchos on ml had some rant about trans people being part of the bourgeoisie agenda or some shit. Which of course, raises eyebrows about how this crowd in general was so against voting and standing up to the guy who is currently actively stripping transgender rights. I’m sure you’re not all transphobes but the fact that this comes from someone at the head of a community, does make one look at the big push to not vote a little differently and makes it look like there’s more reasons for it than just being too cool for school.