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Yassie_Jolly 🎄 :agenderFlag: :transgenderFlag:

I just want to talk here about how we view 'fedi meta', or really, Fediverse social negotiations. The reality is that the Fediverse is a niche, and within that, are many overlapping groups, niches within niches, subcultures, and circles. No two people on the Fediverse have the same circle. Hell, even the same person can have different circles based on their accounts!

There is a reason there is no "Facebook meta", because there is not enough overlap between two random people on Facebook. But take two random users on Fedi and you can definitely get between them in maybe a handful of users.

Looking through that lens, it is important to understand that conflict in a dense social network like the Fediverse is inevitable to happen. We are social creatures. Corporate social media hijacks that to sell you targeted advertisements; whereas the Fediverse uses that feature of our innate being as its basis.

You can think of it like this: Facebook is run in a very large exhibition centre, so while something may happen in another section, it won't affect you. Meanwhile, the Fediverse is run in a very large house that we are all crammed into. It is going to be difficult to not be involved in things that happen at the other end of the house.

Wirh that in mind, it is clear that social networking allows one person to have a social graph that is way more than could be imagined for one person even 20 years ago at the birth of Facebook, let alone 30 or 40 years ago. I think this is incredible, that I can have friends of all kinds of cultures, races, genders, ages, knowledge, etc with their own uniqueness. This is of course, relates to "fedi meta" as we all have such expansive social graphs, with very close, interwoven and interconnected social links. Therefore, the effects of "fedi meta" is felt clearly (and messily), even to users on the periphery because it ripples out so heavily.

That is a lot of preamble, I know, but it's important because we talk about these social negotiations like they are bad things! They are... In many ways, not. The topics at hand, yes, possibly. Social interaction is messy and complicated at the best of times. The Fediverse is a highly connected social system due to its niche. It is not avoidable. We HAVE to talk about things that happen, because we are social creatures and we need to explore our own social dynamics as they happen.

Which brings me to discussing the recent meta, regarding woem.men. I think a minority of discussion has been trying to boil this down to being personal attacks, or even just regular drama, or whatever. I think that is disingenuous, for whatever I have said above. It is not that fedi meta cannot involve these things — again, we are cooped up together, we cannot exist without people bitching about each other like old people at the neighbourhood watch. That is not a fedi meta, that's just being an asshole and using the function of social callouts and social ostracisation as a weapon against people you want to hurt.

There is no "innocent until proven guilty" here. We are not in a court of law, although I can emulate one if you want. We are dealing with social community and social links between people. The court of public opinion has no sentencing guidelines. You can only pass judgement based on belief. Do you believe the evidence you see before you? Do you believe the arguments offered to you?

There is no correct or wrong answer in a definitive sense. There is only what is justifiable and what is not. I don't mean this in a profoundly philosophical sense — I mean this in a sense that we are asking ourselves the wrong question when it comes to callout posts, asking for accountability, etc.

And it's okay to Not Have a Stance. To not think about it. You do not have to. You are ultimately responsible for your own beliefs, even when that one is nothing at all. Social interactions are complicated and messy. How do you make sense of it all, at this scale? Across continents and timezones and with hundreds of people involved? How are you expected to be aware? Put simply, you are not expected to.

Amber 🌸

@[email protected] one of the most toxic ordeals of this has been the fact that people "refuted" our defed reasons. That made its own meta as people who were outside of either community weighed in to comment on whether or not transfem.social was justified to defederate from woem.men. I'm sorry for what I'm about to say, but if you do not like the way your instance's administration is ran you are free to go to another instance. The point of our defed notices wasn't to make a list of allegations towards woem.men as a callout post, it was to inform our users who fall underneath us the reasoning behind the defederation. It was to warn people that they had 14 days before connections would be irreversibly severed, and that if they wanted to continue talking to their friends on woem.men and vice versa they need to come up with arrangements. It turned into more than just that though, it turned into a callout post (which I am not necessarily in disagreement with I support Allissa for coming forward) and it became much more than just that. Now we are at the point in which there is meta regarding every instance who has taken action is somehow "not informed on the discussion" and every user impacted needs to see the chat logs between a CSA victim and their groomer. It's absurd. I really appreciate your point about how this is not a court of law, there is no jury. there is no higher authority ruling that transfem.social cannot defederate from woem.men.

Mosaic Liv

@yassie_j Thank you for stating so clearly that this is not just petty drama, I'm so tired of seeing people say that

Yassie_Jolly 🎄 :agenderFlag: :transgenderFlag:

BTW this isn't about woem.men, it's just that it has been the most pertinent topic at hand -- this also has echoes of other related discussions that I have seen over my time on this Federated Verse

Amber 🌸

@[email protected] And what's further annoying to me is the fact that this became a meta about the protocol itself. That all of these instances were making the same decision based on the evidence, and therefore there's a "centralized" moderation authority. Pointing fingers towards @[email protected] for taking part in this and speculating on the relations with @[email protected] and the sharkey project. People had no reason to continue creating conspiracy theories regarding our motives, to sit there belittling, mocking victims telling them that what they experienced wasn't real. It is hard for me to really put into words how much all of this has made me feel. The fact that we are referring to minors being nearly trafficked on this place with the same "meta" as we would if someone forgot a content warning, or if someone made a bad post. It really is dehumanizing, reducing the experiences of so many into just another "internet conflict" when in reality that's not what happened here. It wasn't some argument that got too heated.

Vivisector "The Mom of Fedi" :veryfriedegg:

@puppygirlhornypost2 @yassie_j yeah that aligns with a lot of how I felt about things during Eve. Stances people took and the fact that it was just streated as the weekly gossip by people and an excuse to be shitheads or weird about something with zero consideration to the fact that there are real victims and so many of them and they can see all of the bullshit you decide to bring in to this. The disposability of victims, simply as people to post evidence and testimony to add fuel to the fire, really hurt my faith in fedi and humanity. I don't really think there's an easy solution to this. It might even just be inherent to social groups once they hit a certain size. But even just having to use the term meta to stay in the discussion at all has always felt gross to me.