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12mo ago

We should defederate from programming.dev

I don't think I really need to explain much, their admins are transphobic.

Snowe, an admin, complained about a transgender person being offended over being misgendered. Ategon made an apology post but keeps snowe on, no public apologies from snowe to the transgender people affected.

Textbook

note: conversation about Ategon's use of the word triggered edited out, might be misunderstanding, need clarified

96 comments

They're probably just jealous that all the best programmers are trans
- Programming.dev admins layering on programming socks like WHY ISNT IT WORKING

Isn't it funny how the anti-"tankies" are always the most bigoted people?
- how does all this fascism keep getting into my anticommunism?!

<---me and the huge fucking mess i've caused
- Your posts are perfect never apologize
  
  lmao dammit you're gonna give me an ego!
  alright how about LOOK UPON MY POSTS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR
- your posts are great. please don't stop.
  
  hexbear is so transphobic with the uhhhh unlimited love and support it shows to trans people
- Not your fault you scratched a coupla libs. Given enough time, any pushback woulda done it.

really burying the lede that one of their admins loves the harry potter and the protocols of the elder goblins game, that's reason to defed alone
- yeah, not meaning to do that on purpose, im well aware, im just a sleepy lady and didnt want to type much but i have duped myself once again

If there's one lesson to be learned from federation, it's that shitty admins lead to shitty instances.
It was also always sus that they blocked a bunch of our comms by default
Also why is the other admin putting out this statement? Is the snowe still seething and crying too much to apologize?
- It's fascinating watching blahaj and blahaj adjacent redditors spin the narrative in real time to feel like they're just smol bean white ciahet programmers being attacked by elaborate trolls.
  Don't worry they're the good ones
  
  The blahaj defederation thread is absolutely chock-full of seething about Hexbear, which is very funny

This genuinely read to me as them using "triggered" in the other sense, like "caused," as gets used in programming speak sometimes. I would never try to argue this as being true because I feel silly in retrospect, but just thought I'd share.
- yeah now that two people have said it, gonna edit it out. i feel like this is my brain doing some weird flips, czechs hell of a drug
  
  Your reading is very reasonable (I think that a general audience of native English speakers would be split on the which sense was being used), so there's no need to blame yourself either way.
  
  That Czechs out.
- nah they're referring to branches of a comment thread being "triggered" in the colloquial sense unless i'm misunderstanding the narrative around the images I can't see (and won't bother going to programming.dev to see)

i dont understand why we're federated with hacker news fuckos in the first place, they should stick to the orange site where they belong.

chuds suck at coding
I don't even have to look but you know it's true

I am surrounded by people like this on a daily basis and would approve of this.
- Seriously. I fucking hate interacting with everyone else in my field. They're all so insufferable.

To be fair,
They're throwing snowe under the bus and openly blame them for it further down. This is a bit of context that I guess is kinda excusing it, although in my opinion your third party program messing up an interaction with someone is a problem that could easily be resolved by realizing you made a mistake and fixing it, which snowe of course didn't do. So maybe they're giving too much credit to a bad admin but I don't think they're really defending the behavior.
I think the triggered has an unclear antecedent, but I read it as "a branch of the conversation was triggered (as in caused/set off)" not "a user was triggered."
That said, I don't really have strong feelings about programming.dev. They don't seem to show up here much but it's a mixed bag when they do.
- hm i guess
  i havent seen anyone say those words that way. also got a minor case of bilingual brain so that might be it too. continuing to keep someone on the admin team that did that and still has yet to apologize to the people affected is a dick move, still.
  regardless, the comments are a cesspool in that thread, grounds enough to defed imo
  
  It would be a weird usage, but people definitely use in a comparable way when talking about video games (event flags and such), so a programmer would be the one to make that stylistic oversight. I can't tell you it's definitely what the admin meant, but it's worth asking.
  
  I read it how you read it and English is my first language. But I do agree I rarely see programming.dev users and when I do, its a mixed bag. I don't have a dog in this race though being from lemmygrad.
  The app I use doesn't do display names so I'm also in the same situation with not seeing pronouns. But I have the better sense to use someone's username if I was unsure.
- The argument that they're using "triggered in a programming sense" is more reason to defed. What it really is is an appeal to nerd identity politics. These people revolve their identity around some lame nerd subculture, and any conflict with them turns into them thinking "wow these normies just don't understand me, a super special computer toucher!!!!!". It's insufferable whiny BS I have to deal with enough of in real life.
  It's also why every "tech" community devolves into nerds whining about culture wars BS instead of actual technical discussion. They're more interested in identifying as a programmer than the actual content of programming.
  
  This is exactly something that happens around these parts as well tbh

Some rules lawyer is gonna say this has to be in the official defederation nomination thread so I'll go ahead and paste it there.
- The one rules lawyer on here is still busy trying to get Melina back on the site by arguing that banning non-standard pronoun users is a hate crime. They're tied up for months.
  
  Then they're supposed to help me get re-barred in New Zealand as well as help me sue the mods for censorship reasons.
  
  This sounds suspiciously like fake news outside the fakenews comm
- i always fuck this up lmao

once again I am proven right about bazingas.

I’m a simple bear, I see defed and I say “yes”
- lemmygrad can stay, as a treat
  
  indeed, at this point I consider them bears and they are excluded from my otherwise strident locals only rhetoric

Hey im Ategon, wanted to clarify some things about the situation
Used triggered in the sense I typically do with coding which is the action of triggering an event to occur. Ive edited it to started to make it more clear
snowe currently has limited internet which is mostly why ive been handling everything and im the one doing things like making the posts, etc. I was able to talk with him about the situation but there hasnt really been time for him to publicly talk about it properly
the comment from snowe was due to it not being relevant to the initial argument rather than targeting the content of the pronoun response itself, It is ambiguous when reading though. Ive been mostly talking to blahaj for now since thats been taking all my free time for the start of the day but im going to say here sorry to you guys as well for this situation happening since it was mostly hexbear users in the conversation
- Used triggered in the sense I typically do with coding which is the action of triggering an event to occur. Ive edited it to started to make it more clear
  Gotcha, thanks.
  the comment from snowe was due to it not being relevant to the initial argument rather than targeting the content of the pronoun response itself, It is ambiguous when reading though. Ive been mostly talking to blahaj for now since thats been taking all my free time for the start of the day but im going to say here sorry to you guys as well for this situation happening since it was mostly hexbear users in the conversation
  I can accept this partially (and will only agree to it if the other trans people in that thread, principally of which, @Kuori@hexbear.net, agrees to accept it) , though the comments in the instance admin thread are vile, and many are attacking @Kuori@hexbear.net and calling her an idiot or a troll for wanting to be gendered correctly. Will this be rectified, will bans be handed out to obvious transphobes?
  
  i think it's reasonable to accept @Ategon@hexbear.net's apology here. they seem to be operating in good faith, despite their...let's call it potentially incautious word choices. that said, two(ish) things:
  firstly, while i don't care if people insult me on a personal level (most of you are well aware civility is not high on my list of concerns), the attitude towards trans people's concerns in the linked thread is not encouraging. calling me an idiot is fine, i'll cop to that and gladly so. but letting blatantly false accusations like "hexbear people aren't even trans! actually they're transphobic" stand is flatly not. as well, the cries of "i can't believe blahaj is defeding us over such inconsequential matters!" don't speak well of some of the users over on .dev.
  secondly, some of our users (like you and cromalin but emphatically not me!) spent a lot of effort trying to educate snowe, only to get back a load of arrogant horseshit. rather than apologizing to any of the people actually involved, snowe chose to...apologize to the admin of a completely unrelated instance? to make myself perfectly clear: i don't necessarily feel entitled to any sort of apology, but i do think if apologies are going to be handed out then a) snowe should be the one doing the apology tour and b) it should be towards our users, since they were the ones actually involved (as ategon acknowledged here). as far as my personal involvement in the matter, i'd just want snowe to stop and listen to trans people when a bunch of us are all saying the same thing. i understand my attitude towards them set an antagonistic tone but stubbornly digging in your heels when marginalized people are trying to explain something they know more about than you do is Not Good. since snowe seems to view themselves as being an "ally" i hope this is something they internalize sooner rather than later.
  i'd also like to genuinely apologize to the folks here for sparking off such a firestorm. i can't help but feel this could have been at least partially avoided if i had maybe chosen to pump the brakes a little bit and been less aggressive out of the gate. it's...something i'm working on.
  (sorry too if any of this is unclear or rambling, it's 4 am and i'm the living dead)
  
  Im trying to deal with the situation but this has been a pain to try to manage especially since its workdays, going to try to deal with the uncivil comments in the thread. Usually we do a multiple strike system for this kind of thing since people can change
- Your transphobe partner should apologize and step down rather than having you do it.
  It's cowardly and pathetic.

I'm willing to hear Ategon out in this thread but generally agree. barring substantial changes in policy, we should defederate.

Every time I see a post that seems horribly out of place, it's usually programming.dev
I agree with defederating simply because their content isn't really what I'm looking for when I log in on Hexbear.

Shocked to learn that we are federated with programming.dev

I'm not well-informed on this specific issue so I'll leave the specifics to those who are.
How to respond to unacceptable behavior is a recurring problem on all sorts of issues, though, and I think focusing on apologies is misguided. I've seen tons of insincere apologies and tons of sincere apologies that are criticized for not being enough. The priority (to me) seems like it should be stopping the behavior and addressing any damage done.
- Makes sense to me, I see an apology as the smallest thing to do
  
  I was thinking something along those lines, too -- I've seen apologies used to deflect from doing anything substantive to address the problem. "We've apologized, what do you want??"

I back this.

Don’t be pushed out of places by a vocal minority?
P.ds expectation that separating a users admin and posting accounts will fix the problems is asinine, but it doesn’t do much good to cede a space that’ll have you because there are stupid people there.
- The two accounts is one aspect thats being added in for another problem that was also brought up in this situation (admin flairs always showing up) and theres some other ways we are dealing with the aspects like transphobia. I outlined a bit of a code of conduct and added it to the things in my queue for creating for the instance with user, mod & admin expected conducts (and all three of these public). Currently we just have rules in the sidebar but this should flesh them out more and let it be referenced well for transparent decisions and things to hold people accountable and help people improve on how they behave. Also have been dealing with things within the admin team and refined our current internal admin guidebook and added some sections there since thats already made while the other one finishes up and been making the admin team go through that. The expected conduct part wasnt in the initial meta post but ive been adding on and thinking/looking at suggestions for improvements for us to make. Also going to be doing an overhaul of our rules a bit once that finishes to reference it more
  
  I get it and appreciate all the effort being put in.
  Here’s hoping we can stay connected!
- Prevents stuff like gross DM’s if we defed
  
  Don't be pushed out of places by gross DMs?

96 comments