Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.

Basic synopsis on my feelings here:

  • tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.

  • I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.

  • I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.

  • The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.

  • Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @simply_surprise@lemmygrad.ml, @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml (an admin), @davel@lemmygrad.ml. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.

I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.

I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards stalin-stressed

I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Them, a bunch of soyjaks: Nooooooo, we need to keep downvotes, how do we show displeasure at lib posts noooooo

    Me, a gigachad: We should get rid of upvotes as well and retvrn to phpBB forums.

    But seriously, that admin is full of shit and always had sus vibes to me. Upvotes and downvotes only came about in Web 2.0 social media sites and even then, it's mostly a Reddit thing. Old-school forums didn't have any of that bullshit. It's very obvious that upvotes/downvotes are used to drive up engagement (people get mad that the wrong thing got upvoted/downvoted) as well as provide a quantifiable metric that the algo, which purposely feeds people angry slop that further drives engagement, can use. So their nonsense of "getting rid of downvotes is lib" is just that, nonsense. The real lib move is to keep the upvote/downvote paradigm that was set up by a shitty social media corporation. Mao's Combat Liberalism, if they are so inclined to consider a shitty Reddit clone as a form of combating liberalism, stipulates that we're supposed to actually explain shit to people, not press a shitty downvote button.

    Their grips about the evil Hexbearian somehow imposing their site culture on their instance is also nonsense. First of all, they (and the vast majority of Lemmy instances) don't have a unique site culture. They're just Reddit clones with the same shitty Reddit-derived semblance of site culture. Oh no, their genzedong-derived culture will have to change. How will they possibly cope. Second of all, a prominent Hexbear user advocating for good changes to make their instance less shitty isn't imposition. Have Hexbear admins threaten the Lemmygrad admins to defederate Hexbear from Lemmygrad? Did Hexbears do a brigardinoTM and mass upvoted your comments? No, we have not. The OP of that thread is a Lemmygrad user, as demonstrated by the numerous posts on Hexbear using a Lemmygrad account, so they can't accuse us of creating alts and trying to change their instance from within. And finally, getting rid of downvotes isn't even exclusively a Hexbear thing since the chasers over at blahaj had done so as well.

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Tribalism over instances is so fucking dumb. I just want all queer people to join hands and sing kumbaya as we nuke Britain into the sea. Is that too much to ask? kitty-cri

      • booty [he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        they're better and don't have all this dumb voting bullshit

          • booty [he/him]
            ·
            11 months ago

            the wolfire forums where i used to hang out in the overgrowth preorderers sections.

            ttlg

            idk somethingawful probably, i never used it but it sounds better than reddit from all ive heard over the years

            • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
              ·
              11 months ago

              SA has a decent Israel/Palestine thread I've been lurking since someone posted a link in the news mega. The vibes aren't as good as HB, but they're firmly anti-genocide, which I've only really seen here, there and weirdly on the celebrity gossip sub r/fauxmoi

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Reddit was a huge step backwards with what we had before, and not only was it a huge step backwards, it also killed scores of forums along with it.