Okay I’ve given this some thought to this and I agree with most of the comments here that mention this is troubling.

Firstly I wanna preface with saying I’ve never moderated anything before so this is new to me so I’ve generally leaned to being more hands off. Saying that I’m gonna look to add extra site admins in the near future who may know more about moderating.

Back to the point, I think the comment @SaltMeadow@feddit.uk made was a great point, in that, I don’t think the community’s idea explicitly breaks the instance rules. But the posts and some of the posters are on the edge/ if not breaking the instance rules so I’m going to remove the community in question to stop it attracting more users who will break the instance rules

Also this instance is supposed to be UK centric, so I think it’s fair to leave communities that are more controversial to other instances who are better equipped to deal with them

With this I’m going to post some more community creation guidelines tomorrow which will give more explicit guidance on which communities are allowed on this instance. I’m leaning towards having political communities requiring approval before being created to avoid this in the future

TLDR: You have to decide early where your limits are or you’ll be overrun before you can react.

https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280891537451343873

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

It was eye-opening. I was very happy I was there to witness/get the explanation.

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.

Just checked it out and agree, that is the beginnings of a harmful community. It doesn’t look too active yet so it would be a good idea to nip it in the bud now, if that’s what is decided.

IMO communities like that rarely bring the crowd you would want to hang out with.

@tom@feddit.uk def seems this community is breaking the instance rules?

That’s troubling.

On the face of it the stated aim is commendable but that’s a very thin line to walk and, unless your moderation is up to snuff, there will be people along to force their agenda on it.

In the side-bar they link to an anti-LGBT space and then there are three consecutive crossposts from that site, two of which are originally from Breitbart, hardly known for its fair and unbiased reporting. Just the high percentage of transition regret articles is a sign that there isn’t much balance going on and shutting down a perfectly reasonable post asking about the community is another red flag as it suggests at least one of the moderators isn’t open to discuss the scope of the community.

They need to get their house in order or it will just become a cesspit.

Also, although there can be general interest communities on here, there doesn’t seem to be a UK angle to c/gender and I wonder why it isn’t on one of the larger general interest instances. Describing one as a “hugbox” suggests they know they won’t be welcome on some/most because a lot of Lemmy instances take a strong pro-trans. I’d hate to think it is here purely because we are a bit more relaxed and easy-going.

Thank you for making this post. I saw it happen and found it very concerning. I didn’t feel capable to address it myself so I am very glad someone else has raised the issue. I would like to hope that the vast majority (should be everyone but evidently not with what’s happened) of our instance will be in agreeance that transphobia is absolutely not something we want to be associated with here. @tom@feddit.uk Please deal with this.

This is troubling. If other instances decide to defederate this one due to the actions of this community, it affects the reach of every other community on here.

If that happens I will be forced to move my communities elsewhere, and I’m sure other communities would do the same.

Of course the transphobe threads are on the UK instance, lmao

This is definitely not a good look, I agree, especially since the instance rules say no transphobia.

Of course, people may argue that it’s “just debate”, but they seem to not realise that there is no debate to be had on the existence of gender non-conformity. There are many things to discuss related to gender, but the things being posted are more arguing the existence of transgender people or why “trans is bad”, which is a complete non-starter.

One of the most common posters there shares articles of Breitbart, for god’s sake, who are not exactly known for being inclusive and arguing in good faith.

It’s like arguing about vaccines: All you’re doing is giving a platform to pseudoscience that people should really not be taking on board. People aren’t rational, they believe whatever sounds the most convincing, not necessarily what is actually right.