cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/12273255
I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days and I’ve already witnessed a lot of thinly veiled transphobia, anything from people dismissing the existence of trans people, to trying to claim we are predators. I’ve also seen people downvoted in the general communities for expressing trans support, or seemingly for no reason other than simply being openly trans or visibly queer. I know it’s an ongoing effort to moderate transphobia on Lemmy, and the fediverse as a whole. We have to also address mentions of thinly veiled transphobia and transphobic users. Transphobia isn’t just a differing opinion, it is a dangerous hateful sentiment which causes harm to vulnerable people and it needs to be addressed, at the instance and community level. We need to put in the effort to identify transphobic dogwhistles and language used by transphobes to eradicate this type of behavior from our communities and servers alike.
Some people will argue that the light stuff isn’t something to worry about, but that’s not true. This is a tactic they use to blend in with normies and make them think that nothing they are doing or saying is wrong. It’s what transphobic right-wing YouTubers and Facebook users do to avoid being banned for hate speech. We are better than these corporations though, Fediverse is run by communities and for the users, we should not let these things slide as easily as Corporations do, they’re in it to make money, we… We’re in it to create a community for the users. Part of that means kicking out those who don’t have all our best interests at heart.
And has your call outs and drama ever worked? No. It never works. You still had to do what did work. All that was produced was more toxic and counterproductive bullshit.
What would work is moving to a different instance with a different identity or better yet launching your own instance.
The problem with mods and admins is that the ownership isn’t widely distributed across the users enabling that dynamic in the first place. This is non commercial human scale social media which means that it is run by people. If you don’t like it or them you must run your own.
Put up or shut up
Oh, it did. A few of us were unhappy with that mod, we launched our own community, which is now far more active that theirs.
For admins, it’s a different story, I agree with you, if you don’t like the admin, just change instances. But for mods, it’s a different story.