When I moved from Reddit to Lemmy, I made an account on blahaj.zone because I wanted to be on an instance that's run by progressive trans people. Being able to trust that the admins will run an instance that's actually protective of its members is such a relief, especially coming from Reddit.

Experiencing Lemmy for the first time was an adjustment. I was using "all" when I normally don't, and that brought a lot of new things, good and bad, into my feed. There were some posts and comments that I found gross, but the things were dealt with or not so bad.

I started noticing a lot of NSFW posts from lemmynsfw with women that looked very young, and I found myself thinking about whether or not to report the content and how the moderators were verifying content. As young looking as possible while being legal and without getting banned was obviously the purpose. I was relieved when defederation happened. All of a sudden my feed was still diverse content, just minus jailbait-simulator. I missed the A+ posts by some of the guys, an Adonis or three, but I survived.

Things were great, then I started noticing the "fuck Ukraine, NATO is evil" posts along with "Tianamen square deaths are CIA propaganda". That's when hexbear federated. Lemmy.ml brought different perspectives, and they were valuable regardless of me agreeing or not. Hexbear is different.

Touting LGBT rights in Cuba, that's great, and I didn't know about the the changes in 2022. TIL. That's my entire list of positive hexbear posts I've seen so far. I'm sure there's more, but the community doesn't seem to prioritize showing that. "Dunking" and snark are not valuable contributions, and the simping for Putin is straight up evil.

Ada and other admins/mods, thank you so much for your thoughtful consideration, your work, and everything you give to make this community run. I'm just a lurker, but I appreciate you all so much.