mastodon.art has decided to suspend firefish.social from their instance due to issues with its administrator. The administrator of firefish.social was found to be boosting posts from a known harasser on another instance. mastodon.art takes a firm stance against racism and suspending full instances in these situations is part of their policy as a safe space. The known harasser has a history of using slurs, harassment, and editing screenshots to spread misinformation. However, the administrator of firefish.social has now forged a screenshot to paint mastodon.art in a negative light.
All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there’s actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I’m wrong.
Pulling out the banhammer and limiting almost 10k users for a disagreement between admins feels childish, imho. They could’ve just as well blocked just the admin of firefish.social from interacting with mastodon.art users. If I were on mastodon.art, I’d be migrating to space with saner administration.
Edit: Clarity.
All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there’s actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I’m wrong.
You know, it reminds me of that as well but I have an opposite take. The forums I was most active on in the early 2000s were generally ones that had split from larger ones and had became smaller but much stronger and more personal communities as a result. You had the luxury of breaking off precisely because there was no expectation that one community would ever have a monopoly for a topic. Maybe my experience is unique, I don’t know.
I can’t speak for the specific situation here because I don’t know anything about these instances. But the ability for people to split off after a terminal disagreement has generally struck me as a strong point to the voluntary federation we have.
It’s not beef between two admins. Mastodon.art is strictly a “safes pace”, so the admin choses what’s safe.
Obviously, an instance admin having no issues with racism is a big fucking red flag about how they mod their instance.
In order to protect their instance and people on it, it’s safer to defederate, than count “strikes” and send warnings.
I really don’t think the firefish admin “has no issues with racism”. The “evidence” there is that Kainoa (the admin) boosted a link to an Electric Frontier Foundation page sent by Eris. I think that’s a ridiculous conclusion to make.
People say that this Eris person has posted some racist shit.
If they are allowed to be a racist shit on Firefish (even get boosted by admin, even though it’s an article, but an acknowledgement nevertheless), I can see how the .art admin can assume that it’s the wild west there.
If we’re stating opinions, I do not think that’s a ridiculous conclusion to make.
How do you know that the Firefish admin was actually aware of any racist posts? That’s quite the jump to conclusion.
The actual issue is, that as an instance admin who had previously been in the loop for some time with #fediblock and other channels in which admins share this kind of info, folks expected him to already have disqordia blocked.
Also, it seems from his posts elsewhere that he actually was aware and didn’t care. Ample reason to defederate from .art’s perspective. (Firefish.social has subsequently silenced but not blocked disqordia)
All of this is relatively routine, the screenshot fabrication thing more unusual.
He has been informed, and took no action. No jumps anywhere.
- No, he was just de-federated with absolutely NO previous communication.
- There is still no real proof that Eris actually is racist at all. Everything is always “someone said/claims”.
- That’s false.
- Don’t need proof, the admin can use their own judgement. This is not a faderal trial. It seems that ~30k poeple on .art trusts the admin’s judgement.
god fediverse drama is so dumb
Mastodon drama tends to have another level of hysteria to it caused by the amount “context collapse” the platform creates. There’s no search or quoting posts or anything that can really “go viral” … so news only spreads through rumours and “chinese whispers”. Which means once some drama goes viral, any one conversation about it is mostly held in the dark, with people mostly speculating based off of some rumour they heard that has gone through who knows how many cycles of whispers, but because of the uncertainty, and the additional gatekeeping culture of outing “the bad people”, a rather elevated energy quickly ensues where people desperately want to know what’s going on, sometimes because their instance is implicated which makes it pretty personal, and want something (ie drama) to happen all to the point of convincing themselves that they do know what happened and what needs to be done.
Behind all of that is the stark reality of the context collapse which means that anyone who actually wants to know what’s happening will find it strikingly or prohibitively difficult to actually find out, which often gets to the point that people will think they saw the evidence and truly know but will disagree or not actually have the evidence they think they do.
The more I see of it, and hear of the issues BIPOC people have had for similar-ish reasons, the more I think mastodon’s design of “safety” and “anti-virality” through limited feature sets is actually an awkward middle ground rather than a good solution.
