I made a character and submitted her!

What weird power do you have that nobody else can do?

I can drain the electrical charge from any battery and transfer it to another. Car battery? Zapped into a AA. AA? Exploding with enough juice to power a small city block for a minute. I can also absorb electrical attacks, but I really prefer not to!

What is your biggest fear?

Static cling. Seriously, the thought of being stuck to someone or something because of rogue electrons sends shivers down my spine. And it happens more often than I would like, especially when people start throwing lightning around!

What crippling flaw do you have?

I have absolutely no sense of direction. Like, at all. I can be standing right in front of the Eiffel Tower and still ask for directions to Paris. This often leads to me showing up at the wrong battles, or accidentally supercharging the enemy’s getaway vehicle. I can’t even use a compass, or GPS, because my static screws up the signal!

What do people call you?

Most people call me Wattage Woman, but my mom calls me “Sparky”. The Big Squeeker (and most villians to be fair) like to call me “Short Circuit.” If only he used battery powered toys, instead of chew toys, I’d show him!

What do you look like?

I sport a bright yellow and black spandex suit with lightning bolt accents that are slightly off-center because I sewed them myself. Think “walking caution tape”. My bright pink hair is perpetually standing on end due to all the stray electricity, and I wear oversized, bright green goggles to protect my eyes from the glare of my own powers. I’m about 5’8", with a surprisingly muscular build for someone who mostly fights household appliances.

A femboy posted a meme about femboys. You came in and tried to tell him that actually, some of those femboys are trans women based on their appearance.

This was a misstep, but that’s OK, because mistakes happen and people’s understanding of gender diverse folk is often limited.

He then told you about his direct lived experience as a fem boy that contradicted your opinions. At this point, instead of listening to folk who are talking about their own experiences, you got offended and started arguing.

At this point, you’re simply out of line. Arguing with folk about their own experiences, whilst not even sharing those experiences.

This isn’t an argument about when it’s ok to assume and when it isn’t. This is a case of you assuming, being corrected, and then trying to turn it in to a debate.

And to be clear, I’m not simply asking you to stop, I’m asking you to consider what happened, acknowledge you fucked up, and then stop.

If I get it wrong I’ll be gladly corrected

You did get it wrong. The OP, a femboy who posted a meme about femboys, directly told you that you had it wrong.

You’re still here arguing, and show no sign of being open to being corrected. Unless that changes soon, your time on this instance is up.

All I can do with remote accounts is block them from this instance. That will also block them from communities based on this instance. You’d need to talk to the admins of the instance hosting the account for anything more.

The user was banned about a week ago

Your motives are clearer now, and have little to do with the clarity of codified rules. Codification of the rules wouldn’t have changed the outcome of those events.

She didn’t know much about me, so she was mistaking my intentions, and that made me feel uncomfortable.

What you’re describing here isn’t empathy in the context of the community guidelines. Broadly, what the guideline means is “think about the impact your words will have on others, and try to minimise the harm they cause”.

And more broadly, it means that if someones words are clearly designed to hurt or upset others, they can be acted on.

Which is to say, it’s not so much about trying to guess what other people are thinking or feeling. That is still part of bigger picture of what makes up empathy, and it helps with assessing whether your own actions are hurting folk, but it’s not at the core of what the guideline is addressing.

Like when you banned Dragon Rider.

Drag took a message I had sent to drag, and shared it in public, without my permission and without notification that drag was going to do so. Drag was also the target of an almost endless amount of hate and abuse over drags pronouns, and for a long time, drag was not banned because I did not want to empower the bigots who were behind those attacks, despite many of drags actions warranting a ban. The sharing of private messages without permission was a “final strike”

Without empathy, drag would have been banned much much earlier. Empathy for the harassment drag was receiving was the reason it took so long for the ban to arrive.

I don’t think more empathy is always good.

As long as you are not trying to hurt others with your words you’ll be ok

As I said, the ambiguity exists whether its convenient or not. Rules just create a facade that makes people think there isn’t ambiguity. But the ambiguity is still there, because the rules aren’t the final source of truth. The decision about what is and isn’t acceptable will never be determined by what rule was codified, it will be determined by the reason behind codifying that rule. The ambiguity is always there. Rules don’t’ change that.

I have seen some weird decisions I didn’t understand and struggled to get my head around them

There will never be explicit rules here, because they add workload and stress, without addressing the ambiguity that you struggle with

As you can also see from the replies here, a lot of people don’t share your viewpoint, so it’s not a clear cut case of rules being universally better for the community. I have to take the communities needs and my own needs in to account, and there is no clear consensus or support for concrete rules from the community.

What I can do is offer the chance to address that ambiguity through other avenues. If you can tell me the things that you’ve seen that seem ambiguous or unpredictable to you, I can explain my thinking and reasoning, and reduce some of the ambiguity. I can’t promise we’ll see eye to eye, but hopefully you’ll have a bit of a better understanding of how things work going forward.

I’ve been building and nurturing communities online and offline for decades now. So when Kaity and I were creating the guidelines for this instance, I knew upfront that there would be guidelines, not rules. And that reason for that is because the rules aren’t the source of truth on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Rules are attempt to codify and communicate what is acceptable, but they get treated as if they are what is acceptable.

If I had a situation where someone needed to be removed from the community, but they technically weren’t breaking the rules, then the rules are the problem. They don’t get to stay just because the rules didn’t capture that specific scenario. But changing rules brings about confusion and contention, because people think it means what is acceptable has changed, when in reality, they just had a mistaken understanding of what is acceptable, because the rules were centered as the source of truth.

It also creates a lot more work on moderators and volunteers, because they have to turn in to mini lawyers, and their actions become shaped by the rules, again, giving the rules first place in what is ok and what isn’t, when they should never be that, because they never can be that. Rules are always imperfect.

And so, guidelines. Guidelines get to the heart of it, because they don’t attempt to define every scenario that is and isn’t acceptable. Instead, what they do is let people know the lens through which decisions about moderation are made. I acknowledge that that means some level of ambiguity. However, there is ambiguity with rules too, we just pretend/forget that there isn’t. But with guidelines, it’s easy to address the ambiguous scenarios and uncommon cases, because the guidelines for dealing with them are simple.

I admin the place. Femininity and I have a strained relationship. It’s not something I’m drawn to, and when I perform it, it feels like a performance, rather than an expression of an internal need or desire. I don’t wear earrings, I don’t wear makeup, I don’t do my nails, and my legs go months without seeing a razor

Which is to say, the pressure you’re describing, the relationship with femininity that you see? For most trans fem folk, unlike me (and perhaps you), it genuinely is an expression of something an internal, a way of expressing something that they haven’t been able for most of their lives. Every culture, even subcultures, have their own norms, and their own ways of connecting and sharing. For the trans fem community, that often looks like joyous embracing of femininity. And finally, most trans spaces are biased towards people who are more recently out, for whom everything is new and exciting, and for whom, joyous embracing of femininity is new, and a chance to explore something that hasn’t been available to them until recently.

And for those of us that don’t really “get” femininity like that, navigating spaces that celebrate it can be challenging, but that’s just how it is. I’m no more going to stop people celebrating femininity than I am going to tell folks they can’t be butch. What we can do is create spaces and niches within the bigger spaces that make room for other needs too. If need to connect with other butch trans fems, make a community, and advertise it, and you will find us :)

Albatrosses are the best! I saw a few of them recently in New Zealand. Beautiful birds!

I wouldn’t mind if there were something separate from the rules that illustrate some examples of behavior that would be considered rule violations

Examples are listed in sidebar too!

It’s all in the sidebar of the instance!

That’s already how it works :)

I’m old. When I wasn’t old, Shania Twain had a period where she was on the radio a lot. Every time “Man, I feel like a woman” came on, people would wonder when I had become a Shania Twain fan

I honestly don’t remember. It was 5 or so years ago. From memory, they were small brown gel caps, and I initially took 2 of an evening, but moved down to 1, before stopping. Can’t remember the dose in each cap

All I remember is that it made me wake up feeling like I was slightly hungover.

TIL, hiking to Mordor can be dangerous :P

https://walkingintomordor.com/lord-of-the-rings-road-trip/