As posted about recently in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca it seems that @nutomic@lemmy.ml's stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don't think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it's open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it's very likely they won't have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can't speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn't inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven't seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don't want to see that, don't open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I'd really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj's local community on this, I'm not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren't from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
Personally, I have a very poor opinion of nutomic. And yes, he has always been/felt transphobic. He has a history of making massive oversteps to attack people that have differing opinions to his, and overall I believe him to be a threat to the trans community. As for whether we should defederate? I really have no clue. It certainly isn't a bastion for blatant transphobia, and hosts many of the top Lemmy communities, and a very large amount of the active Lemmy userbase. I think the effects of defederation would be immense, and take a lot of time and consideration to understand if it's overall beneficial to the community. That being said, I'm sure I could be swayed to support either side. I'd be very curious what Ada has to say about this, as I believe I'll support her opinion on the matter.
EDIT: I think it's valuable to point out that any individual user can block an instance in their settings. So regardless of any defederation decision (which Ada seems opposed to), anyone can choose to block the instance themselves.
The solution is to organically marginalize .ml by supporting other activitypub projects. Then we get past the whole issue of major communities being hosted there, or them being a necessity institution.
Honestly, yes. I definitely agree that this is the way to go.