Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I’m probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.
Basic synopsis on my feelings here:
-
tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority’s lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.
-
I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.
-
I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.
-
The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don’t want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.
-
Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @[email protected], @[email protected] (an admin), @[email protected]. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I’ve seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.
I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I’m pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.
I’m extremely disappointed in what I’ve seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards 
I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone’s lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.
I think most of what you say is at minimum valid points of concern and critique for lemmygrad, but none of it rises to the level of defederation making sense.
If you want to change a community, especially one that you only have limited involvement in, it’s very important to be patient and to understand where the people more involved in the community are coming from (no investigation etc).
If you aren’t up to that because it involves suffering through a certain level of bullshit (and it does), that’s totally fine, but it’s more a reason for you to stay off of grad than for us to defederate.
Dune fox boy has an attitude problem and I think that’s concerning, but even as we seek for him to fix it, we need to understand that he has been one of the main admins of grad for a long time and been dealing with liberal bullshit from federated communities for a long time and his excessive defensiveness (and it is excessive) does not merely come from a fundamental evil in his soul nor does it mean we should flatly condemn him instead of work with him to improve.
We are all humans here, and I think that the people on lemmygrad (even Dune boy) have demonstrated that they want for things to be better than they are, so it is worth suffering their weak points just as they suffer ours so we can both try to help each other improve. Not everyone in each group will necessarily be up to that, but they can just stay in their own circles because each group respecting the other’s rules is a reasonable baseline expectation that is already enforced.
Edit: banning you was incorrect and Dune boy should apologize for that one, imo. Banning someone to get them to disengage when the interactions are negative is valid, but that doesn’t seem to be the given reason nor would it have been timed very well if it was. You were treated with a lack of respect and benefit of the doubt that you should have been given as a relative pillar of a sister community and that’s not okay.