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Ategon @programming.dev

Instance admin updates + Blahaj

Hey everyone. Some of you may have seen the recent announcement with blahaj to defederate with the instance. Ive been handling things privately and wanted to do an announcement to catch you all up on the results of that

#1: Background knowledge

Realized that not everyone knows how the instance is structured so figured I would do a little section in the front to go over that (especially for visitors reading this from other instances)

We currently have 8 admins in the instance. Of those 2 people are currently lead admins (snowe and I). Majority of admins are part of the community team but not all of them (people are split between infrastructure, development, and community). I was planning out a team page similar to what lemmy.world has to go over this with a bit more detail and that should be coming in the future. Main thing though is its intentionally structured so one person doesnt solely have power (hence the two leads). If one person ends up messing up theres the other lead and the rest of the admin team to talk with them about it and help them do better in the future.

#2: What happened?

There was a thread in lemmy.ml about the hogwarts legacy game winning a steam award. For reference for the following images + description, snowe is the other lead admin for the instance apart from me and the other people are various other users

There was a conversation that ended up essentially devolving into a slap fight within this post (ive purged the entire conversation so people dont stumble onto it in the future but ill post images here with them for archiving reasons and to explain it)

^ These comments were what initially started it. Essentially it was an argument about the hogwarts legacy game being or being not transphobic

^ Later in the argument

^ One branch that ended up getting started due to the frontend snowe uses on mobile not showing pronouns (how most instances handle it currently is its appended to the end of the display name but some frontends choose to ignore the display name and just do the username instead)

(edit: changed the word triggered to started to make it more clear what definition of triggered I used. Forgot that tends to not be common usage)

There are other branches but it is a very large amount to screenshot and dont want this to completely flood this post. Everything should be available in the modlogs still if you want to dig a bit deeper or I can send other screenshots in the replies on this post if youre interested in what was said for certain parts

#3 Aftermath

Due to the argument above blahaj chose to defederate with programming.dev which was going to take effect 48 hours after their announcement on it. (This is due to the person in the conversation being one of our lead admins which is ultimately understandable as they represent the instance)

snowe has sent a message apologizing to ada (the lead admin for blahaj). I dont know the contents of what was said but if they want the two of them can choose to publicize it.

One of our admins should not have escalated the situation and participated in this slap fight so on behalf of the admin team here were sorry about that

Internally we have a guidebook for admins to follow for the various aspects of the instance (moderation, applications, etc.). Ive refined this guidebook with a couple new rules for admins that should be taking effect in the future

  • admins will be required to have two accounts, one for admin activities and one for non admin activities. This is how some admins have already been interacting in the fediverse and basically makes it so comments done on the non-admin account should not be taken as that admin speaking on behalf of the instance. Generally the admin account will be things done relating to admin duties (e.g. my posts here in meta) while the non-admin account is other various conversations. Admins can be as anonymous as they want with the non-admin account similar to how our users here can be as anonymous as they want with their accounts
  • im adding in some guidelines for tone while chatting for the admins so comments made that are on behalf of the instance should be respectful and not devolve to slap fights

Like I said before in #2 ive also purged the entire conversation to avoid people stumbling onto it and seeing a slap fight with an admin that has since apologized. As the community exists on lemmy.ml I cant fully do this due to how federation works in lemmy but the mods in the community have been doing the same which should federate.

This should not have happened in the first place and we as an admin team will be better going forward

I hope the blahaj instance sees our actions and chooses to reverse the defederation decision but at the end of the day its their instance and they can choose whoever they want to federate with (note federation is done directionally. I will still leave our direction of federation open)

Edit: Blahaj stopped their defederation (shown in an edit on their announcement) so the two instances will still be federated both directions going forward

Another edit: its a work day, its midnight here, and some comments here are also devolving into slapfights. Ive locked the post since this has already taken up most of my free time to try to handle and moderate this. My dms are always open if you want to dm me regarding the situation

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90 comments

  • Instances getting de-federated over such trivial things is going to be the death of lemmy.

    • Nah it'll just kill Blahaj. Trigger happy instances cause people to leave and join more permissive places, because let's be real, a user should curate their affiliations and connections, not an admin on their behalf.

      I am happy on .ca because I have the freedom to interact with essentially everyone worth interacting with. If it was not the case I may have gone over to .world or any of the other billion awesome instances we have. I could even run my own, if it came down to it.

      • I agree. My instance is locally focused so I can just ask rando's off the street here in Tucson. Turns out people don't like feeling controlled very much and want to be able to talk to friends that are on other platforms, and that's why we won't be defederating from meta/threads.

        I have a sense, though, that Blahaj is mostly not real people. Sometimes I wonder how easy it might be to give someone like Ada a false sense of support by loading up the instance with LLM bots that all act like Her. (It's her, right? God please don't dox me)

        Ive just grown skeptical that people actually operate like this in real life, or rather, enough people to actually matter. And that makes me further question the authenticity of entire instances like Beehaw or Blahaj as "lefty safe spaces". Seems to me that they function more as a way to provide reasons to dismiss the progressive movement rather than join them.

        • People definitely act like this on the internet.

          The loud people on that part of the internet are by and large the same people who are afraid to ask for more ketchup at a sit-down restaurant.

        • Beehaw is great, but all I ever see from blahaj users is them stirring up shit

          • I'll respectfully disagree if only because I had to nuke my beehaw account because apparently disagreeing that doxing extremists as an effective means of movement building or defense is tantamount to being a transphobe or Nazi sympathizer.

            They say "be nice". But to me it seems like it's just a type of mean that marginalized folks find acceptable or moral.

            My instance is still federated with them. But, I generally don't participate anymore. Not like I used to.

            It's a shame because in the early days I was helping them out with federation issues and a few other things on their discord. Spent many late nights helping Odo troubleshoot things.

      • I hope you're right and I'm just being pessimistic.

        I chose mander for the same reason.

    • It's not just the trivial things themselves -- it's also the idea that admins will have to police their users for trivial missteps, under threat of defederation, so no one will want to run a server.

90 comments