As posted about recently in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca it seems that @nutomic@lemmy.ml’s stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don’t think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it’s open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it’s very likely they won’t have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can’t speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn’t inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven’t seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don’t want to see that, don’t open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I’d really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj’s local community on this, I’m not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren’t from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
I agree with you but I do want to clarify this point.
Since Lemmy uses the underlying ActivityPub protocol you can use something completely different and it is compatible. For example in response to this latest drama with Lemmy devs I switched to fedia.io, which is running on Mbin and not Lemmy. Mbin is compatible with Lemmy because Mbin also uses ActivityPub. The compatibility happens on a protocol level not the service level. You can go search up Mbin magazines (which is essentially the same thing as a community) and interact with the same way as you would with a Lemmy community. You can’t set up a community on an Mastodon instance because it doesn’t have that functionality but you can theoretically comment in Lemmy and Mbin communities thanks to the ActivityPub. You can also use Piefed as it fills the same social media niche. The platforms that are incompatible would be platforms that are not using ActivityPub.
Instance owners can’t just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it’s not that simple. But for the average user you can create an Mbin account and as long as the instance is federated with all the instances your Lemmy account was then you can subscribe to all the community you were subscribed to before and the only functional difference in your daily usage is the sorting algorithm (. For instance owners the only possible solution may to be have a migratory period where you have two instances running, so people could slowly transition from one instance to another but looking at how hard it was to get people to move from Reddit I think moving instances is a whole other topic.
I’m not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won’t be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.
That was really my whole point, since the databases aren’t compatible. A switch from Lemmy to something else would reboot the instance completely. But also it’s not necessary for instances that aren’t lemmy.ml. Maybe some instances out there are loyal to .ml but that doesn’t mean all of them are. This one certainly isn’t and neither is my main one dbzer0.
That’s good, I see a surprising amount of people saying that users and instance owners should switch to piefed or mbin over this as a form of “boycott” which I think is dumb because we don’t have any onligation to give money to the devs, to support them, or even to federate with them. This instance banned nutomic for his transphobic rhetoric, and quokk.au defederates all of .ml as a whole.