I made some off-hand comments on a post on 196 and didn't realize they'd be taken the wrong way. I made a few more comments to help clarify my idea but caught a blanket ban from blahaj.zone with no warning or message.

https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=588349

I'm mortified :( It's never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of "Our differences shouldn't be minimized because they make us special" was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.

But with no prior warnings or even a message from a mod to 'cool it', I got banned from the entire instance. I love these communities (feel free to look at my 2.5 years of comment/post history) and I would like to be able to continue to participate.

So, is there a formalized method of ban appeal beyond messaging mods? Their instance has like 12, so I don't want to spam them and have it seen as harassment.

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[–] dzsimbo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I had to google TERF, but I am familiar with the overall notion (I heard about it from gay circles).

So I think I'm missing context. If OP reacted unkindly to someone facing these issues IRL, banhammer was in place. Just talking about these stuff shouldn't be tabu, because of tolerance.

That being said, if blahaj is a safe zone for the lgbtq+ folk, OP has only themselves to blame. I accidentally commented on a lemmygrad circlejerk thread with 'well, akshually..' and I was torn a new butthole. Even though my argument had merit, it wasn't the right place for it.

Thanks again for the details. Lemmy is wild.

[–] mapto@feddit.bg 7 points 1 day ago

I'd like to point out that in !techtakes@awful.systems they have a rule saying:

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

which they use to wolfpack onto anyone who even remotely questions their tribal consensus, even if that person is coming from sharing a post that is well aligned with them.

Lemmy is wild indeed.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The blahaj server is dedicated to the gender diverse, and a safe space server.

196 is a safe space community, since before Lemmy (r/196 is over 10yrs old)

It is quite specifically a community that contains people who have dealt with these sort of divisive comments before, and a server that has dealt with those sorts of divisive comments before, and is explicitly not permitted on either the community or the server itself. Detailed out rather thoroughly in the sidebar, including noting comments that challenge someone's identity.

So yeah, OP only has themselves to blame, though I'll say the argument that resulted in a ban has zero merit anyway (for reasons previously mentioned).

[–] Jayjader@jlai.lu 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I want to chime in on the subject of community sidebars.

To my understanding, many of the mobile apps people use to interact with the fediverse (and more specifically the threadiverse) haven't figured out a great way to render community sidebar content in a way that a new user knows that it exists. Sidebar content is accessible, but often hidden in a sub menu or a non-obvious interaction. I use Boost, for example; in it you swipe inwards from the right side of the screen to slide the sidebar into view. This isn't surprising to me, a somewhat veteran Reddit user that expects communities to have sidebars and for those sidebars to be on the right side of the screen. However a user that doesn't already know about community sidebars has almost no way of discovering their existence when they use Boost. Mobile apps have limited screen width so they tend to focus on their "principal use" (visiting a community to browse their posts), but if you don't know that communities have sidebars in which they describe themselves and their posting and commenting rules it's very easy to end up in OP's position.

Not to excuse their comments nor question their ban; I agree with the decision by the mods of c/196 to not spend any more effort dealing with such an oblivious user.

I suspect many Lemmy clients are designed for experienced users who already know how to navigate the space(s) and how they function. Yet much of the "how do we introduce new people to the fediverse and onboard them?" discussions I've seen seem to settle on "suggest a generalist instance like LW or .zip, suggest a mobile app like Voyager, and make them start browsing! Newbs are put off by having to do work like read up on an instance". I wonder how much this end up contributing to creating cases like OP's.

Then again, !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone was plagued for over a year by men claiming they were "just responding to posts in their /all feeds". When told about the community's rules and sidebar, the most common response was along the lines of "I can't be bothered to read the community name before commenting on a post in my feed, now I need to navigate to the community and find their sidebar?? This community should find a way to prevent their posts from appearing in /all instead". If these users aren't going to the effort of reading the community name as displayed on posts then there's no guarantee they would read community sidebars even if they were already on-screen, in front of their eyeballs.

Even in the comments on this post I can see the argument that basically boils down to "spaces that don't cater to me should also bear the effort of keeping out of my way" being voiced.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 2 points 1 day ago

Even in the comments on this post I can see the argument that basically boils down to "spaces that don't cater to me should also bear the effort of keeping out of my way" being voiced.

I think that sums it up well, even if the sidebar was presented the very first time someone went into a community, some people wouldn't read it, some people wouldn't care about the rules, etc.

So thats where moderation has to step in like happened here. Every community has rules, its not on the community (or the server) to make sure that visitors are aware of them, its on the people joining in on the conversation. I don't know that there is a better way to present the rules than simply making them available.