this whole thing has been a mess so, here are some bullet points of what we expect going forward.

most immediately: both sides of this are going to have to make peace with being uncomfortable. it is Grail's right to argue the premise that there is ableism against people with NPD; but, it is also the right of everyone else to disagree with that, and to disagree with it for personal experience reasons. if that's a problem for you, don't engage with this stuff and block people, full stop. genuinely: do something else. this is our third discussion on this subject and i have seen exactly zero minds changed as a result on either side, so i doubt you're going to be the first if you're obstinate enough.

if you would like more elaboration on the line we take here, please see our essay On Content Removal, and specifically this section:

However, from a pragmatic standpoint: Beehaw is ultimately a public space - curated as it may be - and you will be exposed to content you neither agree with nor feel comfortable with as a product of that. This is perfectly fine. It is also fine to disagree with some things we allow here that you personally would not. These are normal parts of existing in public spaces with other people and using services that are not your own respectively. But that also means you must be willing to compromise or take personal action to protect yourself sometimes - our moderation cannot and will not guarantee a completely agreeable space for you.

From a logistical standpoint: we simply cannot privilege your personal discomfort over anyone else’s, and we cannot always cater specifically to you and what you want. Your personal positions on right or wrong are not inherently more valid than someone else’s when weighing most questions of how we should moderate this space. There are often plenty of people who do not feel like you that we must also consider in moderation decisions.

secondarily:

• it is understandable that neopronouns (especially of the sort in play here) give people trouble, but if someone politely asks you to use their pronouns/corrects you on what their pronouns are then we'd request that you either do that or just disengage entirely. this seems pretty straightforward. you especially do not need to give your opinion on the validity of them, because it benefits nobody.
• same deal with the word "narcissist"--if someone doesn't want to be called that personally, honor the request, find some other agreeable word to use between you, or just don't argue and move on with your day. there are undoubtedly more important things you could be doing besides getting into an argument over whether this is a proper ask to honor.

we're obviously, contextually talking about deaths from heat, not from all the other stuff that happens on Hajj. don't do this "you cannot be serious" routine when you simultaneously don't even engage with the context of the question

yes; as far as i'm aware there has never been a mass-death event like this in the contemporary history of the Hajj, although it's always been arduous and more potentially deadly when it falls during the summer

The various initiatives — known as Tempo 30 in German-speaking countries, City 30 across Europe, Love30 by the WHO and 20’s Plenty in the UK and the US, the latter referring to miles per hour — have been gaining steam in recent years. Paris and Brussels introduced a default speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour in 2021, Lyons in 2022 and Bologna in early 2024, with Milan and Parma planning to follow suit this year. Beyond the EU, Wales introduced a 20 mph limit as the default for all residential roads in September 2023, and a couple of US cities, like Portland, have begun reducing their residential speed limit to 20 mph.

you may take the United Fruit Company's name, but you can't take its legacy of financing terrorism and violence in Latin America...

in this case: no, they're just Filipino, and it seems to just be a contraction of Jupiter or something similarly banal. i think it would be prudent in the future to do a bit of double checking before we start accusing people of Nazis; you can easily check your assumption by just visiting their mastodon page, linked in the description of their kbin account.

this article is a byproduct of some delightful media news (Grist acquiring the long-shuttered The Counter and reviving it as a column), incidentally

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

unless we're compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.

with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

we're not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us--we've been quite public that we'd be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that's what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way--and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you'd like.

this is actually quite cute, i think.

i don't think "adding race-specific stripes to a pride flag" is a bad thing, is "treating people differently based on skin tone" except in the most cringeworthy, pedantic, I See No Color way possible, or is "racist"—and i think that if you believe these things you probably will not be allowed to partake in discussions like this on our instance after today

So a pride flag that is clearly textbook racist is good and arguing against it and the people that say its better because of the racism is not allowed here

when you call them racist and imply they're segregationist for having their preference, yes, that is not allowed. that's needlessly aggressive and needlessly sectarian—and speaking personally, "having a preference for more stripes on a flag that represent marginalized communities is racist and like segregation" is just such an overstatement of the point (that i otherwise agree with, for the record—i am not a fan of the progress flag) being made that it verges into being unserious.

also in Israel news today is this--the probable shutting down of Al Jazeera's operations there. Netanyahu says he'll act swiftly to request the outlet be banned under this new law

the strategy here appears to be that Israel is trying to bait Hezbollah into attacking them, which is a very sane strategy and not at all completely psychotic

Otherwise you could claim a crossdresser were trans or people who claimed they were “attack helicopters” would have to be accepted as trans because there would literally be no argument you could make against it.

this just sounds like a skill issue on your part, i'm sorry--this is not an issue if you have a postmodernist understanding of gender, which most trans people (myself included) subscribe to.

at the end of the day when you drill down? there really is not a material difference between the "real" and "fake" genders--gender is entirely socially constructed, and the designations of "male" and "female" that most people fall into are as arbitrary as any xenogender (real or frivolously created by right-wingers). you only "lose" by entertaining frivolous designations if your understanding of gender is already so narrow that you can't conceptually accommodate anything beyond a handful of stock gender identities to begin with.

yeah the difficulty here really is: even if we wanted to stick around (i think the consensus is not especially) and even if we did get the mod tools we think are needed (no reason to believe this will happen), the bridge here is burned pretty definitively. i don't personally see the sense in sticking around on a place where the people stewarding the software have an actively adversarial relationship with us

so, irritatingly, we appear to have absolutely no control over this as far as i can tell--i just spent about 15 minutes investigating the options available to us in Baserow to double check.

without reducing them each as persons into cartoon villains in my mind

if you "reduced them to cartoon villains" they would literally be less evil than they actually are. Republicans writ large would gladly kill billions of people if it kept the fossil fuel money going—and we know this because they are actively choosing to do that by denying climate change and making it as difficult as possible to move away from fossil fuels as we speak

Not one person on Earth would raid the capital building for Jeb Bush.

people literally did this to disrupt the 2000 recount in Florida on behalf of George W. Bush, Jeb's careerist failbrother. you cannot seriously think this is only a populist thing

As much as they’d like to deny it, they are responsible for the rise of Trump and extremism.

reducing voters to brainless automata who have no agency in the rise of fascism is a good way to completely neuter your ability to actually combat fascism because many Americans are active participants to the project of building fascism, not idly going along because of partisan voting. bluntly: if fascism had no base, elevating it wouldn't work in the first place

whenever my dad gets to shopping (not for lack of pestering on my part), most likely the first solution will be chemical--but in the interim i'm just trapping them and drowning them as they appear, which has worked well enough because i only see one or two a day and they really stick out against our walls. helpfully they also don't seem to have gotten into any furniture or other places it'd be hard to root them out from, and we vacuumed the area they originated in which i suspect got a lot of them early