As a transwoman, I understand that feeling of acceptedness within the Chapo community and I can imagine the feeling of betrayal that they must be feeling. I joined about a year ago at one of the lowest and most pivotal points of my life and the community has helped me to grow as a person and to really turn my life around for the better. I’m personally trying my best to provide the same safe and protecting community for trans and non-binary people here that I saw in the subreddit that allowed me to blossom so heavily. However, a blank slate means you let go of the things that happened in the past and we all move forward on this new platform, where I have taken steps to ensure that trans people are more protected so situations like this do not arise. Spamming the Lemmy does not constitute a move forward.
Marie stated in one comment that, “I was, unfortunately, misgendered by someone on the discord (and had been multiple times by that point) and so I expressed my feelings that not enough was being done to protect trans comrades.” If they looked at the trans and non-binary dedicated community, they would see several points where I have provided updates on the site-wide pronoun tags (entirely separate from community flair, I might add) that are coming down the pipeline of updates, which I strongly pushed for and had the pleasure of discussing and brainstorming with the developers to make a reality. I personally didn’t think the Discord had the capability to fully prevent misgendering because it would require someone to click on another person’s profile and self-investigate? So how could that be improved moving away from the Discord? On the Lemmy, pronouns will be immediately next to your name site-wide leaving no excuse for misgendering going forward.
Someone else stated that “it’s kind of depressing that lgbt spaces here are empty” and “it raises the issue of what the priority is in affirmatively making sure there is a space here in chapo for our queer comrades to have a home, vs being a home for cis comrades to affirm their own perceived tolerance.” It’s hard to pull people to Lemmy when there is no guarantee I can prevent things like misgendering otherwise I personally would be trying to pull all of my trans and non-binary comrades here. It’s actually one of my biggest concerns and I have addressed this concern in our space. I’m hesitant to really do anything in the trans and non-binary community until I can guarantee that no one will face dysphoria on that front.
I have discussed at-length with other moderators that I (and I can’t stress this enough) DO NOT want cis people on my moderator board, as our people do not need cis people dictating the manner in which we can converse with each other about our trials and tribulations. Marie stated they want “reform” and for the “mod team to not be shit”? Here I fucking am. They want mods to be “held accountable for their actions”? I will absolutely swing for the fences for our people. “Will this ever happen?” they asked. Yes.
UPDATE:
I have tried everything possible to make amends. Yesterday on the statement I made allowing for any good faith grievances to be discussed, I received countless comments telling me to “talk to the Shorks”. Getting specific names of people in the Shork server was no easy feat, but I did it. I ended up reaching out to Shorkena, one of the moderators on the Shork server that Marie was kind enough to put me in contact with, and tried to pull together a group chat to have a good faith conversation about how to move forward. I tried everything to reach some sort of agreement. They’ve been spamming demanding that their voices and grievances be heard since we opened the Lemmy and I have gaven them multiple spaces space to freely do that and openly discuss grievances and how to move forward in good faith and they shuttered.
I gave them every opportunity I could possibly think to give and they squandered it and even went as far as mocking me within their own server and digging up drunken shitpost Tweets to openly mock me about instead of discussing their actual grievances with me, which you can see in the Imgur directory below.
I remained hopeful throughout all of this that I could pull something off and end all of this, but I have concluded there is no good faith attempt here anymore.
For all of those interested, here is every interaction I’ve had with any of them involved: https://imgur.com/a/rfN6joQ
REMOVED IMGUR ALBUM SO THOSE INVOLVED WILL NOT BE DOXXED.
I just want to emphasize that Discord Bad and bringing bad discord blood to the subreddit/lemmy makes the subreddit/lemmy bad.
TLDR: Discord bad. Blank slate on Lemmy good. Leaving behind Discord bullshit biggggg good. Trans people feeling safe and welcome here like I’m working hard to do HUGE GOOOOOOOOD.
Mods/Admins have stated that “clean slate on lemmy” is out the window apparently? I don’t really feel safe in a place where it feels like people get banned for just disagreeing :(
The clean slate on Lemmy is for those people who don’t act in bad faith, brigade, and spam with others.
Marie has been involved in that since the initial dev instance prior to us going live, and then subsequently in several other brigades since then. Other users here who have been banned from discord have been allowed to create accounts here and post under the clean slate; the difference being that they have not acted as spammers, brigaders, and other wreckers have.
Leaving behind Discord bullshit biggggg good
I feel like that’s been code for just ignoring the legitimate grievances raised. Telling the trans community to just get over it isn’t going to make them feel comfortable returning to the greater chapo community.
Let’s take a look at those two statements that you in particular made. 1)“it’s kind of depressing that lgbt spaces here are empty” 2) “it raises the issue of what the priority is in affirmatively making sure there is a space here in chapo for our queer comrades to have a home, vs being a home for cis comrades to affirm their own perceived tolerance.”
I came in as a mod AFTER all of this blew up. I’m not saying to get over it. I’m saying that instead of making blanket statements that they’re empty or not a priority, you could ask what could be done to help with the endeavors that I’ve been working my ass off to think of and plan out so trans and non-binary people in particular can feel safe, welcome, and comfortable here. I personally did not like the Discord and I’ve analyzed functions and flaws of the Discord that opened up my people to transphobia and mistreatment and tried to improve upon them here. I’m open to hearing out grievances so I can more properly and efficiently make adjustments as a community leader so that my people feel more welcome here. If there are grievances that I haven’t addressed in this thicc statement, by all means, post them in the transenby_liberation community that is ran by trans/enby people and for trans/enby people.
I think this is conflating a “truth and reconciliation committee” approach with a “blank slate” approach. With a blank slate approach, feedback and suggestions don’t need to be couched in previous discord discord.
If there are concerns, they can absolutely be addressed and fixes implemented without re-litigating disputes form another platform.
The problem was bringing Discord mods to be the mods here. It’s such an inane decision considering they’re the reason the Discord fucking sucks.
I don’t think it’s the only or even the primary reason the discord is bad, but ideally the subreddit style moderation/moderator waves will return as this community grows beyond the original nucleus of discord users.
the subreddit style moderation/moderator waves will return as this community grows
It will not though, the subreddit’s mods were lax and Beatnik wasn’t in charge. He is here and apparently has promoted only the most prudish people who want to impose moderation on everything or they don’t feel like they’re doing something, which is exactly what a new community does not need. Clearly this will only be realized once it’s too late and this place is straight dead.
its just weird that this platform attracted the most drama-mongering people to whine and moan about the drama on the discord
Jfc what the fuck happened on Discord
A lot of drama between a small group of people. Some of the drama was serious (pedo-defending mod who got axed) while some of it was less serious and made to seem like a bigger conflict than it actually was. Some of the conflicts were centred around people accidentally misgendering users, which is what this update is supposed to remedy.
that’s why pronoun tags are in the works. calling each other comrade is a roundabout way to make misgendering technically not a problem rather than addressing the root cause - the presumption that people are cis men (or trans women upon learning that someone is trans), i.e. cissexism.
I could be wrong but I thought they (the axed mod) were defending pedo shit (loli drawings), not a specific pedo person.
Someone asked me to make this a top-level comment since it might get buried otherwise since it’s nested deep in the thread here, so here’s a very long response to the Imgur album of chat logs with the admins and all of the associated claims regarding the Discord server and its staff that’s been circling around, which I hope can answer some questions: https://hexbear.net/post/3351/comment/23404
That link doesn’t seem to direct me to any specific comment. Am I doin it wrong?
this is what the mods say is chibi: https://i.imgur.com/jArJz56.jpeg
for real though they were defending this: https://i.imgur.com/QwjDtnb.png
You really should be putting NSFW warnings on stuff like this. It’s not really allowed here anyways (hence why other mods have been removing it) but it’s not going to go away so I’ll address it further.
Basically everyone I’ve asked, including both furries and non-furries, just say that the characters in that image look chibi to them. Someone that was even detached from all this drama was saying this same thing in another thread, and you refused to just look up the countless other chibi furry images that have the same appearance and proportions as the characters here: https://hexbear.net/post/3809/comment/25656
Those are background characters that aren’t the focus of the image, so they’re styled differently and in more cartoony fashion. They’re the adult fursonas of friends of the artist. Again, this wasn’t even a commission from Quill, it was just something drawn by an artist friend using Quill’s character.
But of course, it’s entirely subjective and it’s impossible for me to prove what something looks like. The only other thing I can say is that the site it was hosted on, e621, has a massive legal requirement when it comes to tagging and blacklisting underage content due to their agreement with Cloudflare. Because of this, they’re incredibly rapid and strict with that kind of shit. In the tags, there was absolutely no suggestion that there were any underage characters in the image. If the ages were remotely ambiguous, it would’ve been tagged that way, but to virtually everyone that’s seen it, the thought of it being underage hasn’t even crossed their minds.
Whenever a different staff member on the Discord revealed themselves to be an apologist for loli shit, they were immediately banned. We don’t take this kind of thing lightly. But this idea being pushed about Quill is just totally at odds with reality, and it makes all of the accusations being made seem progressively more bad-faith from my perspective.
Someone else stated that “it’s kind of depressing that lgbt spaces here are empty”
This is just a matter of posting. Make it a routine to post something every day and build a community. There might only be 5 people in it to begin with actively posting, but be consistent. YOU are this community – the userbase – make the space what you want it to be.
This is why I post so much in the megathreads. Its totally not because I am a loser with no life.
