It is about not wanting to be federated with instances with transphobic admins.
I might be missing something, but I believe an admin being potentially transphobic only matters if they do not moderate transphobic content that leaks out to other instances. I don’t think I’ve seen transphobic content leak out of programming.dev.
That said, I’ve read some of Adas comments on the intention behind defederation, and blahaj. What I’ve learned is that Blahaj wans set up as a safe space, so 0 tolerance is understandable, and is well within their rights to establish and enforce.
Coming from someone who is just looking to Lemmy as a reddit alternative, it’s simultaneously cool that communities can do this, and a little unfortunate that with Lemmy being as small as it is (compared to reddit), we are defederating over single comment threads. Again, blahaj was intended to be a safe space and has no obligation to be a part of the “reddit replacement” I’m looking for, so if they deem it necessary then good on them.
Shout-out to framework laptops for repairable, upgradeable, and reusable components.