STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS RESPONSES TO ALL THE EVERYTHING. Kinda tired in general so I guess I'll try to do this all in one go. Also my notifications broke somehow while I was away, but that's unrelated. I had a sharper tongue than I meant to earlier & may have been a bit too harsh, but my biases still go towards the victim of this harassment campaign. I got some literal breathing in and metaphorical and yeah, Margot is right, it is more nuanced than we thought initially.
Also she's right about how us transfems receive words like that, it's usually a red flag, even if y'all had noble intentions. I'm of the type not to trust authorities or strangers and I tend to be a bit stubborn at times; so, hey my bad if I said anything untoward. I also have a general distrust of men in power just in general, this isn't about me, but I wanted to give a little more context about why I lashed out a little. I still am suspicious of Paradox too for the record and I think it's going to take the server growing and getting better to change my mind.
I also fully agree with "the victim of all this should have the say on what kind of reparations she wants, not us observers, even if yes, it does set a precedent for the treatment of all of us, trans women." 100%. I think the mods have earned a lot of good will too even if I just have a general distrust of authority figures. Being trans online is scary, but having discussions like this is important.
I know Homestuck is a business/brand/corporate entity and it probably has to operate like one, but so far I've been mostly happy and satisfied that it's working towards being a trans-friendly one, which is much more than can be said about literally MOST major platforms. I don't think it was unreasonable of me to think there was an NDA in place, a lot of big projects use those, but I also think I was jumping the gun a bit in the hypothetical NDA's application and pointing fingers; I acknowledge that. Most of us here are talking over keyboards and so intent is hard to read, I'm very stream of consciousness where my lips/brain voice moves faster than my fingers do; so, sometimes I miss outputs. I do think we all just need to take a breath though, good points have been made by all of us except whatever that weird puritanical crap was earlier obviously that was walked back by that same user (we love someone willing to learn).
I also agree about putting out a statement or maybe making a new rule that "we aren't here to deal with your smear campaigns, what you do or find outside the server is on y'all" might be a good way to discourage people from bringing it up? Either way, the no harassment rule in the discord should also help and if ignored, boom you're out as the mods have been doing.
Also, I'm aware people can Google search whatever they want, but her posts are probably already being spread around uncensored by actual bad actors anyway. I'm helping negate that by censoring them and I added alt-text for viewer accessibly. It does unfortunately have the ability to be typed out, but we as non-mods don't have a peak behind the curtain like y'all do and we wouldn't have been necessarily aware anything was being done without having had all these important discussions. Knowing how the sauce is made has brought important nuance to light.
Also yes I'm keeping the victim's full online name redacted and plan to continue doing so because she's a marginalized person and is the target of this harassment campaign. Also to quote Margot here "I mean this with all the calm and comprehension I can muster. Put out the fire first, then we can talk about who started it." Regardless of whether it was Paradox or whoever, we need to acknowledge the effect it had on the victim and can still acknowledge the nuances of the entire situation in the same breath.
Good to know that he's been seemingly a good ally from your perspective and I'm glad there's plenty of transfeminine and/or transfeminist. My bad for the vitriol if that really is the case and also like the victim said it seems what was said and how it was handled was just a case of being "comically incompetent." Using the words from the post of course.
"the history of the homestuck community's ability to stand for trans women is, at best, fraught, and at worst, utter failure." Oh yes absolutely, part of why I'm glad there was a new discord, but that's a different can of worms. "i don't want to see it become a pattern. again, smoking craters where trans women used to be." I resonate with that heavily. If there's one place you'd expect allyship and support it's in the series fandom with a trans mc, that's for sure. Also this is taking me a while to type because I'm babysitting a cat whose very needy. 💜 If anyone wanted a little positivity amidst all this stuff, this little princess is interrupting my typing flow. DEEP BREATHS PEOPLE. 💜 HAVE A CAT! Good to know, no NDAs, got it! I'm glad these are made as group decisions and that there's a sort of democracy in place of it all (not sure what a better word here is but you get what I mean, I think, I'm tired of the word "democracy" too in how it's used in modern times sorry y'all lol). Also in regards to Alexis leaving if things got bad along with that other person, good on ya.
Yeah I'm sure bad ideas get tossed around, happens in any organized group like you said. I'll still be updating this post if something comes up, but I'll try to be more graceful about too and not post when I'm not fully mentally awake. Trust in strangers is hard and I'll still be critical of any authority as I'm prone to doing, but your message is reassuring. Please take care of y'alls mental health if you need to, someone I've been in touch with from the forums had to mod for a 600 person server and I was told it was a fucking nightmare. This server is like 16.7 times that capacity, but dear gods am I glad and ever so thankful that it isn't fucking AI moderation, something that would absolutely be used to silence marginalized voices from the community space.
Oh yeah I fear vanilla discord stuff is fuck awful, absolute hot dog water even for a boosted server I'm sure. I'm glad to hear tools will be better in the future and I'm glad you were willing to listen to what we had to say even if we didn't have all the context and I was a bit harsh this morning. I'm glad I could bring this to y'alls attention and so could others posting in here. Not really sure what else there is to say for now (by the time I post, watch there be 10 thousand new replies oops). 💜
This is a tangent but if y'all or someone with higher mod tier run any kind of live streams on the server, don't expect it to work that good if you gotta join the VC channel(s) to watch it/listen in. 2 major boosted JJBA servers tried it on JOJO day when a new part was announced and it was LAGGY CHAOS. Twitch side/youtube is a better option and y'all could have like an attempted disord watch lobby as an OPTIONAL THING. We were all relying on the event tickets of like 3-4 different people and screen shares of screen shares from those with the best possible wifi, STILL lagged even then and the quality was absolutely shot.
Sorry I forgot to do my usual bold names thing, I'm tired and I just wanted to address everything I could. Hope everyone has a nice day and if Paradox reads this and wasn't actually trying to be malicious, then my bad bro. 🫡 Glad y'all understood why I was as freaked out/worried as I was though given I'm transfem and the Internet's history & current culture wars. 💜