it is that simple yep - at least concerning specific constituencies.

To be clear the mods locked it in under 2 minutes of it being posted with no comment or message.

My two DM attempts over the past few days to raise this issue with Tom, the admin of Feddit.uk instance as a whole have so far received no response.

I’m currently holding off on raising the Fediblock flag on this to escalate it to a larger issue in need of attention to the wider fediverse, as im hoping this is growing pains and time to adjust, and because i really would love to see the wider Feddit project succeed with instances flourishing but the actions of the lead moderator of Gender are clearly only looking to reinforce their own anti-trans stance which contravenes the rules of this entire instance which specifically state “No Transphobia” but as of yet the instance admin doesnt seem to be interested in enforcing that and that brings the federated safety and reputation of this place into doubt. If the instance was a mastodon instance it would already be fully defederated from by the wider fediverse.

I have raised this before, the fediverse is heavily trans lead, the ActivityPub code its built on was programmed by a trans woman, many moderators and admins of instances are trans, and the community doesnt approach “Transphobia” as negotiable or a debate in the manner that places like twitter and reddit or the UK media or Government promote for financial or political gain from rage engagement and “culture war”.

The lead mod has since started posting in the anti-lgbtq instance anti-trans articles, after going on bended knee asking them as “an anti-lgbtq instance” to come and join in his community here which lead to them starting to post articles from a self identifying far right ‘finance and news’ website as well as videos mocking trans existence.

They’ve defederated from a Iot of common badfaith instances on the fediverse, lot of pleroma and masto troll/fash instances - which is normaI for admins on the fediverse. Its active protection of your users from harrassment. Most mastodon instances have 200-400+ instances blocked and defederated. Its standard.

Lemmy admins may be new to the fediverse, but once the troll instances start to realise how easy it is to mess with you from the safety of their instances, you’re going to need your admins to start communicating with the long term masto admins, get their blocklists and recognise how they keep their users safe proactively rather than retroactively.

Defederation is one of the strongest defenses the federation has in terms of maintaining stability within its wider network and enforcing that admins/mods do their jobs. Its a matter of everyone seeing eye to eye and agreeing on ground rules for civility and agreeing they’re going to moderate to a decent active standard and keep control of their users. If an instance is unable to keep control of its house, or the admin goes AWOL and ends up with tons of bad faith users running amok flinging poop everywhere, then yeah they will get defederated. It can always be fixed later on with serious discussion and commitments made between the admins of instances.

But yeah every instance on the fediverse that doesnt want underage porn / nazi imagery / fascist agitators / gore / hatespeech etc getting posted continually to their users, is going to have to defederate a couple of hundred instances. The Fediverse is a lot bigger than Lemmy, and people outside of Lemmy/Kbin can all post to your instances and your threads, or even start our own threads.

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.

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?