this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Feddit UK
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Hi, chiming in as a person from Mastodon from the past 7 years.
The rake in the grass that Feddit UK is going to run into is Transphobia.
FedditUK says in its rules that it wont allow Transphobia in its communities, fair enough, if thats truly what they mean great.
But this is the same rake in the grass that many of the newer instances over on mastodon since Musk took over twitter have run into, many of the journalism instances for example had strong "No Transphobia" rules, right up until a Telegraph journalist that was a user on their instance posted a transphobic article at which point the mods suddenly felt they simply couldnt restrict the free speech of a journalist even though it directly contradicted their own server rules.
The firm "No racism, no transphobia, no homophobia, no casteism" of the federation is pretty strict on that and many new comers to the fediverse find it shocking how "i just want to debate your right to use the toilet" isnt allowed on federated instances. And remaining connected to the greater federation requires that social contract and showing you're actually moderating and removing bad actors from your instance and blocking bad faith instances to protect your users and users of other federated instances who may use your communities/magazines/subfeddits for discussion.
The giant federation that agrees to these rules thrive as a big hub network, but theres thousands of tiny instances out there that dont that are defederated for very good reason (loli, gore, terrorism material that is illegal to own/view in the UK), a dark side to the fediverse ocean which is often joking referred to by mods as the "c*m" side of the federation (due to the sheer staggering amount of tiny 1-5 people instances with that word in its url), that includes places like gab, truthsocial, spinsterdotxyz (anti-trans subreddit), and so on.
lemmy federates with mastodon and pleroma, which means its open to all the above instances, theres gonna be a ton of instances that lemmy instances need to block to keep their users safe from spam and illegal content.
But after that, the question still remains, what are the admin or moderators of any of the FedditUK communities going to do when the transphobia rake appears in front of them?
This makes sense. But the biggest issue is that the word "transphobia" means different things to different people, which then makes it a nightmare for anyone trying to police a space with free speech.
There is a similar problem with Homophobia but less marked and controversial perhaps? I'm a gay guy. If someone says "I hate gay people" thats obviously homophobia. But if someone says "I don't think gay people should marry, because marriage is a religious thing" is that homophobia? I don't agree with it but it's an opinion. Someone can be hateful and hold that opinion, but that opinion itself doesn't mean the person is hateful - at least to me. But another gay person may say "no that is hateful in itself". Where do you draw the line?
Also to my understanding the fediverse doesn't have any written rules on what is allowed. Each server sets their rules, and there has been consensus around certain rules (such as those you mention). The complexity comes in enforcing the intepretation of rules by one server on another, and the risk is fragmentation with some places defederated between others and people getting confused what is or isn't interconnected. A may defederate from B, but both may stay federated with C. The content on A and B is visible from C but users interacting with content from C on A and B won't see each other in C's communities or interect.
I have no answers for this. It's just going to be a big challenge that is inherent to this model. But it is still way better than what exists in old social media.
Yes, people used to twitter and reddit do often think thats a problem that cant be solved, but quickly find out it really is actually pretty quickly solved on the federated side of the fediverse.
"I dont think gay people should be allowed to get married" is a homophobic statement, so yeah no you cant post that publicly online on a space that doesnt allow homophobia. It gets flagged as homophobic, the person who flagged it's moderators immediately talk to the person who posted it's moderators, and they're asked to remove it and either warn the poster from ever doing it again or if they're seen to be a bad faith account thats just trying to spread hatespeech, they're given the boot from the instance. If the instance moderators refuse to accept it as homophobia, then a fediblock post is made and over the next few hours most instance admins read the situation that an instance is refusing to uphold the pretty clear cut no homophobia stance and say hey if you dont start enforcing your own rules that you list on your site, we're going to have to assume you're a badfaith instance, a danger to our communities and defederate from you. It really is that simple. Same with transphobia, casteism or racism. People are welcome to hold hateful viewpoints, but you cant start trying to debate them or push them on a site that doesnt allow it in its rules.
The Fediverse, ActivityPub, was built by transgender people, the moderators of many of the key instances, are transgender, the federation is deeply transgender and the "No Transphobia" rule is pretty concrete in the same level of rock hard as "No Racism" regarding what most good faith instances accept those things to mean.
Thats why its a rake in the grass for new instances, especially ones that are UK based due to their abysmal degrees of transphobia in their media and how far anti-trans activists have sealioned the idea of "yes but what really is transphobia" over the last 8 years.
The good faith federation doesnt have free speech, the federation isnt a place of free speech. The federation bans outright most places that include the phrase "free speech" in their community rules pages because its 100% only ever used as a dogwhistle by far right instances.
If someone says, “I hate black people” that’s racism, but if someone says “race based slavery should have never been ended and black people should lose their rights to live as they see fit” that’s an opinion. /s
You see how plain off that sounds?
This is a strawman argument. I was merely trying to give an example of the difficulties in absolutism when talking about moderation. My example may not be the best one but the concern is valid - anyone who thinks moderation will be easy in the Fediverse because everyone will be in harmony and agree on what is acceptable and what is not, is naive to be honest. There are already communities that don't adhere to the same rules and standards as others, and as you scale up the fediverse into millions of people and lots of communities exposed to each otherthe complexity will come to the fore.
Basically don't see the fediverse as a golden bullet for solving moderation issues or coming to a happy consensus. It removes the corporate control and influence but each community will come to it's own consensus about what is and isn't acceptable. Beehaw is an early example of that - they wish to control and vet who can participate in their community; that is an understandable aim due to the ethos of their community but it may be very difficult to stay federated and achieve that.
The fediverse is a great concept but I suspect we're going to see a lot of fragmentation into "miniverses" around acceptable codes of conduct and content, because a single broad consensus is very difficult to maintain at scale.
I'd say that's pretty homophobic. You don't need to be an outright homophobe to say or do something homophobic, or support homophobic systems.
trans main character syndrome strikes again.
there is sadly lot of hate out there, but why on earth do you think it all about trans ?