Honestly, yes. I definitely agree that this is the way to go.

Regardless of the tone, the opinions he is discussing and the ways that he represents his views are inherently transphobic. He and his views are a threat to us at Blahaj Lemmy, being a space for queer folks (many of us are trans). He is also the lead developer of Lemmy, and the head admin of lemmy.ml. A statement does not have to be framed as a direct insult to be hateful and harmful, and the fact that these views of his have been persistent, along with his influence, means that he as a user is dangerous. Hence why he has been banned from this instance. The question being discussed is really if his views are reflected into the community and moderation at lemmy.ml, because that is the point at which the instance is harmful enough to defederate from. If lemmy.ml is a place where transphobia is allowed to propagate, then that is immensely harmful for us. We need to protect ourselves against transphobia.

What about [email protected] or [email protected]? Those seem decently active.

The former of the two (which is also the larger of them) has 13% of the userbase, although you’re correct that it does seem fairly active. I suppose that would be a decent place to migrate to if defederation were to happen, although I tend to mostly help out new users, who tend to flock to the larger community. Again, I’d figure it out if it happened, it wouldn’t actually be a problem. The latter of the two I would not consider very active by comparison.

That is a minor drawback. It would be nice if they implemented ownership transfer abilities for posts and comments, though it’ll probably be a while before we see that.

Yes, this is one of the grievances I had when migrating here from lemmy.world, as I have some very detailed and helpful comments I wish were easier for me to find. I’d love to see that as a feature in the future, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

I can see how and why this would be a problem and why this should be carefully considered, that can be a poor outcome. I guess the same can be said for any defederation including the feddit.uk one. It all depends I guess on how they handle these issues going forward and also how they handle this subject overall. If a lot of the people there are “I support trans people but I don’t think kids…” (you get the idea) it doesn’t really do much good to federate with them. At least in my opinion.

Yes, I agree here. What I suppose I’m basically trying to say is that defederation is an extreme option, so it has to be considered carefully. If the community on ml starts to reflect transphobic views, then absolutely that would warrant defederation. But if it’s a single admin, and it’s otherwise being moderated to remove transphobic content, then I do think it’s really difficult to determine without a lot more consideration. In most other situations, banning a single transphobic user may be sufficient. It all depends on how his views are reflected in the moderation and the content of the community as a whole. If it’s resulting in transphobia, then it becomes a much more clear case. I don’t have enough information to know if that is in fact the case.

Context for why they’re blocked here

lemmy.blahah.zone does not allow downvotes. And the concern is moreso that some transphobic content wouldn’t be moderated (based on nutomic’s views), hence the burden of moderation would come down to our instance’s admins, and that simply shouldn’t be their responsibility. Defederation is for situations in which the instance in question is harmful to the community in the instance defederating. And if transphobia is not properly moderated, and transphobic views are allowed to spread, then that is actively harmful to lemmy.blahaj.zone.

I mean, the two big communities for me are [email protected] and [email protected], though the latter of which isn’t really active anyway so I wouldn’t be sad to see it go. There isn’t a suitable replacement for the Linux community elsewhere, and that’s honestly what I’m most active on, but if we defeferate, I’d probably just cut my losses. Yes, it is easy for people to create new accounts, but the hassle is that you cannot transfer your comments or posts to a new account, so you lose that history (as I’ve had to deal with). But overall, I think most people on ml would just stop seeing posts from our instance and never think about it. It would be a small minority that would even notice, but the majority would be getting less content from diverse voices in the queer community overall. Again, it would just take a lot of consideration.

Personally, I have a very poor opinion of nutomic. And yes, he has always been/felt transphobic. He has a history of making massive oversteps to attack people that have differing opinions to his, and overall I believe him to be a threat to the trans community. As for whether we should defederate? I really have no clue. It certainly isn’t a bastion for blatant transphobia, and hosts many of the top Lemmy communities, and a very large amount of the active Lemmy userbase. I think the effects of defederation would be immense, and take a lot of time and consideration to understand if it’s overall beneficial to the community. That being said, I’m sure I could be swayed to support either side. I’d be very curious what Ada has to say about this, as I believe I’ll support her opinion on the matter.

EDIT: I think it’s valuable to point out that any individual user can block an instance in their settings. So regardless of any defederation decision (which Ada seems opposed to), anyone can choose to block the instance themselves.

I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I’m unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it’s worth looking into.

As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It’s Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this if you have been prescribed oral estradiol (that is, taking the pill you are prescribed daily in a single sublingual dose). The significantly higher bioavailability of sublingual administration can cause incredibly high spikes, and the significantly shorter half life over oral necessitates taking the estradiol 3-4x daily to maintain (only semi) stable levels. This requires a dosage and schedule adjustment; it is not sufficient to simply take the same dose of oral prescription and start taking it sublingually once daily.

Additionally, the stomach does not destroy estradiol. The reason behind the low bioavailability of oral estradiol (and by extension, also oral progesterone) is that it passes through the liver before entering the bloodstream. The liver processes the estradiol before it enters the bloodstream, resulting in significantly less E2 available in the blood. This also presents an additional long term problem that has been well documented at this point: liver flooding. The high concentration of estradiol entering the liver in a short amount of time puts an incredible amount of strain on the liver, and can cause long term liver damage. This is alleviated through sublingual administration.

The sublingual route has its own pros and cons (mainly the incredibly spiky and unstable hormone levels and requirement of frequent 3-4x doses per day), and it is not advisable to recommend someone take the medication their doctor prescribed them in a manner that is not consistent with their prescription. OP’s prescription was written with the intention of it being taken orally, thus the dosage has been planned for that, not for sublingual.

I took mine sublingually for awhile, but I am now switching to injections, as I am not happy with the dosage frequency. I’ve missed doses because I also struggle with ADHD, and it’s resulted in me feeling really off when my levels get too low. I would never do oral, as it isn’t an effective way of taking estradiol. It’s incredibly inefficient and presents its own health issues. Injections are the most convenient and most stable option (although I haven’t looked too deeply into the implants, those may potentially be more stable, but estradiol cypionate allows me weekly injections that peak at ~175ng/dL and trough at ~135ng/dL, which is very stable inside my target range), as well as being quite cheap and well studied.

TL;DR: Either talk to your doctor about adjusting dosage and scheduling for sublingual administration, or do the due diligence of reading about it. I recommend the meta-analyses from Transfeminine Science. The dosage and scheduling need to be adjusted if switching to sublingual.

I agree with the shared sentiment here. Satire is great, and it has its place, but when the things the people you are satirizing are saying are on par with your satire, it’s just depressing. Like, I can understand things being a joke, but it isn’t funny if all it does is remind me of how, without the context, it would be impossible to tell by glancing if this was actually stuff said by these kinds of people. The joke falls flat when the joke is so close to reality, that it’s just a reminder of how awful people truly are. I understand that people deal with trauma and misery through humor, but this is such a strongly sensitive topic, that the jokes about it in this capacity (at least with this execution) aren’t funny. They’re simply depressing. So personally, regardless of the satirical nature, I’m not going to go out and defend that community. There are plenty of people out there who wouldn’t even think it’s satire, and it could simply feed the cycle of hate they’re a part of. I draw the line on humor when it can be used to fuel the very thing it’s making fun of. The reliance on people being aware enough to understand that it’s satire is a big flaw to me, especially given how widespread this kind of thinking is, and how close your satire is to the reality.

Just my two cents.