• shel left this community on unhappy terms when snouts died and afaik still does not look fondly on it. that’s why the post is on cohost, not mastodon. linking to it from a mastodon rules list is a crossing of streams which is really socially fraught and i would Advise Against out of respect for all people involved.

• mastodon’s queer community in 2017 knew nothing about being a community, and we owe a great debt to the progressive jews who were here to tell us how it is done. there is, i think, an above-average amount of jewishness in mastodon culture, dialect, and norms. even so, nobody has ever used “lashon hara” to mean anything other than the jewish concept as applicable to jews. yes we all knew what it was.

• lashon hara’s applicability to mastodon primarily came in the form of maintaining community integrity by letting bygones be bygones (look there’s even an english phrase). whether you commit lashon hara against somebody not in our community is between you and the Most Holy. it’s not moderators’ jobs to keep tallies of your levels of sin (imagine literally having a rule like “DO NOT SIN” lmao). the only reason an instance admin should intervene is when it actually affects the people here.

• if you are an instance admin and your definition of “community” includes “abusers”, stop. the only way this rule would be relevant to an instance administrator in that circumstance is if said abuser was fully redeemed AND the person badmouthing them WAS FULLY AWARE OF THAT FACT. that would indeed be shitty, but that is such an improbable scenario that it hardly needs a dedicated rule. the far more likely scenarios are either (a) the abuser is unrepentant and unredeemed, or (b) the person talking shit is as yet unaware of any personal growth the (former) abuser may have had, neither of which can be accommodated by “don’t commit lashon hara”.

• why?? would you do this???? have you no understanding of how meta works on mastodon???