There are a few users on the site without pronouns now (other than “none/use name”, I mean like there is no pronoun field at all)

Was considering writing a no-fun-allowed patch for this unless this is intended behavior now? I would have submitted a diff but I can’t build lemmy on my system to test any changes :(

It seems like the patch would be pretty easy, there is already pronoun validation code it just needs to be applied when people try to update their username

This seems like a deviation from the path laid out for us by comrade TC69

What do you think?

  • AutomatedPossum [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    65·
    2 months ago

    Cissies not being forced to pick pronouns is pure revisionism and needs to be adressed ASAP. If people have deliberately circumvented the pronoun selection, they should also get banned.

    • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      28·
      2 months ago

      I was there when it all happened, “revisionism” is absolutely the word for it. So many cissies trying to weasel out of just doing one little thing to support trans comrades here. 100% behind patching this.

      • footfaults [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        The original proposal didn’t have enough options. That’s what caused most of the issues.

        Sure there were some transphobes out there that lost their shit, but there were legitimate issues with the lack of choices when it was first proposed

        • AutomatedPossum [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          14·
          2 months ago

          I had a very strong impression many of the complaints came from concern trolling cis people and they weren’t very convincing in hiding their transphobia. They particularly did not complain about a lack of neopronouns, although some complained about opsec reasons - which can be easily adressed by picking none / use name or another neutral option, or just lying - if you value opsec over validation of your gender identity, why would you need a site culture where he / him is the implied default?

          If people weren’t happy with the lack of neopronouns (which was, ofc, a legitimate concern), why would they oppose pronoun tags on principle instead of demanding them, but with more inclusive options? The majority of the criticism back then was thinly veiled transphobia, please don’t try to legitimize that.

          • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            6·
            2 months ago

            I had a very strong impression many of the complaints came from concern trolling cis people and they weren’t very convincing in hiding their transphobia.

            as a cis guy who was there, I agree. I remember being against mandatory pronoun selections just from my own perspective (I’d rather people just hit me with the they/them or implied neutral he/him or random she/her or whatever else they feel like than feel the need to check what I set it to) but I have come to understand the other perspectives. And, when I was against it, it was in the mildest “this isn’t really a big deal” kind of way, I remember scrolling through the thread(s?) and just being like “what the fuck is wrong with these losers” lmao, the struggle session really baffled me at the time. it’s a pronoun box, it isn’t the end of the world

            In hindsight, I understand that we had a pretty big core userbase of reactionary internet troll / bully types who liked dunking on liberals way more than they were interested in any kind of solidarity with their comrades. they understood enough about communism to know why the end goal is correct, but didn’t really care about how a communist movement could or should be built. surface-level communists, i guess

            and to conclude this ramble with some kind of point: I think that this struggle session and a couple others were necessary for the identity of the site and for its long-term health. it’s good that a bunch of dumb nerds went full pronouns over a lil fuckin ui element and got banned and we built a pretty strong community of people who were, for one reason or another, in agreement about the fact that those guys sucked and it’s good they’re gone

            • AutomatedPossum [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              11·
              2 months ago

              ofc that should be an option, i’m friends with trans people irl that need this option because these people want to be adressed without third person pronouns, but to say that lack of options was the actual main concern in these struggle sessions is denying that we had a substantial number of transphobes from r/stupidpol in the community when we originally got kicked out of reddit, that they vocally opposed the trans inclusivity of this site, that we successfully purged them and that this was a good and important part of building the site culture.

    • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      2 months ago

      I think a ban would be a bad idea, some users might be using alternative apps that don’t present hexbear’s vision clearly or other issues like they may not natively speak English or did it unintentionally. I’m very serious about the unintentional detail, there is a way to do it accidentally, I can explain how to any admins in private if necessary.

  • Mindfury [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    57·
    2 months ago

    Uphold TC69 thought, patch it and maybe set any missing to “none/use name”

    if anyone has wound up with “joke” custom ones outside the previous settings, gulag

  • makotech222 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    39·
    2 months ago

    sorry all, seems like one of the lemmy updates we rebased on removed our pronoun validation on the backend. ill take a look at it pretty soon, 0.19.4 is coming out soon so ill be checking this again once we rebase on top of that.

  • ivy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    21·
    2 months ago

    i’m not sure i’m following but i just wanted to say that i am a boy cat

  • popcornlung [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    2 months ago

    I looked for five minutes under my profile for the pronoun selection screen until I found it in settings. Not very intuitive, would like pronouns to be available at account creation. Set the default pronoun to cis/gender because it would be funny.

  • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    18·
    2 months ago

    I know there are clients like Jerboa, are those guaranteed to support custom data fields that instances may add? Might be something one of those is doing but it’ll never be enforceable for federated users as things are currently.

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      18·
      2 months ago

      In this case Hexbear’s web UI actually just puts your pronouns in your username (display name is the Lemmy term). All that has to be done is enforce that there are pronouns in your selected username in the server code

      • RedWizard [he/him]@hexbear.net
        English
        6·
        2 months ago

        There is a difference between Username and Display Name. You can’t “change” your username and it has different character requirements and is used for authentication. Display Name can be changed at any time using the Default UI and can be what ever you want and is not used for authentication.

        Hexbear replaces the text field for Display Name with the pronouns drop down. It then combines your username with your pronouns and saves it in your display name field.

        If you have API access you can update your display name to whatever you want because the UI is what enforces the pronouns not the server (as you identified).

        The display name is used externally by other instances so it needs to remain compatible for federation. That way pronouns are displayed for users on other instances.

        I’m not really sure if you can add validation to the field without breaking external users display names.

        • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          It’s doesn’t seem so difficult to me, we just have to check if local users have valid pronouns (valid in the sense of it’s in a list that can be checked by a computer lol, not ideal but yeah) in their requested display name when they try to use the save_user_settings api. According to makotech222 elsewhere in the thread we actually used to have validation like this but the code got lost in an update

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      39·
      2 months ago

      Hexbear had a problem with some stupidpol types in its earlier days. It’s one of the reasons downvotes were removed and among other things TC69 led the purges and some of the education that set site culture in a more positive direction.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          2 months ago

          It was not overt, it was backhanded stuff with downvoting and concern trolling about the addition pronouns and whether people should be forced to assign them. This went on for some time until TC69-thought established a total purge after peering into voting habits and discovering certain people were consistently downvoting the trans topics and acting in bad faith. There were wreckers among us.