So, historical materialism time: certain other banned subreddits with lemmy forks had issues early on rooting out racists and transphobes. There was a lot of pushback from the aggressively white/masc subset community for what they considered overreactions to microaggressions. But when push came to shove, they would often show their whole ass and post the most vitriolic and honestly boomer chud shit to grace the modlogs.
Please keep your minority comrades in mind when posting and moderating your communities. We are service workers, factory workers, and low-level clerks in this together with everyone else, and we would like to believe that socialists care about us too. This is not to say I doubt this community at all, but just wanted to convey lessons from the past.
Trans issues, pronouns, and race issues also make a great litmus tests for weeding out Maupin-type “nationalists” who are mainly self interested.
Hoping to see great things from this community, and nice to meet you all! (っ_)っ
I love this. There are plenty of opportunities for education and for critical analysis that can correct this behavior. However, the reality is that moderator policy and structure (having open lines of communication with prominent members of marginalized communities, for example) will always involve tradeoffs in who is being empowered and who is being centered. Some people are so used to being centered and unchallenged that they will leave at the first sign of accommodations for others. It’s easy to say the slogans and repeat the theory. It is another to actual engage with that practice and do the relevant self-criticism.
I’d like to add that a strategy which found success at Hexbear was essentially to deputize core community members to assist in boosting marginalized voices. We want to give people the chance to participate in liberatory learning, but the people the most qualified to teach are the marginalized people themselves, who were very prone to burnout from having to answer the same questions over and over and constantly feeling the need to defend their own existence in what was supposed to be a community opposed to bigotry.
The solution? In the case of trans issues, we basically created a coalition of trusted trans users who would consult each other on the party line for various issues. We found that some cis users would do a full 180° flip in reactions based on whether the person they were talking to was cis or not. So trans users would literally write the party line and cis users would copy paste it in to do the frontline work of explaining or arguing. The trans users were of course welcome to join in, but the point was to make it so they didn’t feel obligated to across the board. And these party lines became part of the site culture so that most people who have been around long enough know them and can help spread the info.