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I'm seeing a lot of "defederation sucks because silly drama means I can't see my friends' posts anymore" the last week and it gets my blood boiling.

First of all, with regards to the current thing, it's not "silly drama". I'm not gonna debate this in detail, but even if you ignore the long pattern of shit behaviour previously, the current incident is entirely unrelated to that and just plain wrong behaviour. As a matter of fact, it's a dead-to-rights privacy policy violation.

Second: "But our users don't want to lose their friends" is not a blank check to behave like shit. That is how instances become "too big to block". That is why people are still on Twitter despite the nazi CEO. It's the literal nazi bar problem. When someone runs an instance that's open to the public, they take on certain responsibilities, such as behaving in their users' best interests. If an admin behaves so badly, their instance is getting defederated, blame the admin, not the people who defederate, including defederating for their own users' safety.

Third: at least bother to try and get an idea what's going on. Framing all defederation as "admins get in a fight and take it out on their users" is just lazy and frankly benefits people who are rightfully being shunned, because now their harmful behaviour is downplayed as "getting in a fight", not to mention that it evenly distributes blame between the one who misbehaved and the ones who won't tolerate that behaviour.

In turn, let me reiterate something I wrote a while ago:

The corner of the fediverse most people around here hang out is majority-queer, and within that, majority-trans. You can't throw a rock around here without hitting an instance owner who's queer. My timeline is like 90% queer by volume.

So when it seems like "they're going after another queer instance again", or "they're taking the trans admins down one by one", or whatever, consider this: in a predominantly queer community, most abusers will also be queer, simply because almost everyone is.

If the entire population has, on average, say, 10% abusers and 10% queer people, the overlap between those two groups is not gonna be very large. Nine straight abusers, one queer abuser. But if a sample population has 90% queer people and the same 10% abusers, then it's gonna be nine queer abusers and one straight abuser.

It's simple statistics. Queer people are not inherently always-innocent saints. There are enough abusers among us, I should know, I've been victim to several in my life. When a queer admin behaves like an arsehole and is subsequently shunned, and it's the tenth time a queer admin behaves badly and is shunned, that does not prove the existence of an anti-queer witchhunt.

It's not by definition queerphobia just because it's directed at a queer person. So long as the person isn't, directly or indirectly, demeaned by attacking their queer identity, it isn't queeerphobia. Saying "pfft, of course they're an abuser, what do you expect from a faggot" is worlds apart from saying "this person did something wrong and we will not stand for that".

Please.

Learn those lessons. Remember that.

Anyone who's spent any meaningful amount of time in larger queer groups knows there will always be abusers who are queer and weaponise their queer identity to protect themselves from accountability. I'm not even talking about the current meta specifically, it happens all the time. I've had the misfortunate of falling victim to abusers who used their being queer to frame themselves as innocent saints who are being wrongly persecuted. Or who used their autism as an excuse to rape people (fortunately not myself) because they claimed they didn't ignore a no, they just didn't pick up on the subtext. Elon fucking Musk is, besides being a nazi, a huge fucking arsehole whose fans use his autism (or so he says) to defend him and paint him as a Rain Man-style genius savant whose rudeness isn't his fault.

Remember all that, now and in the future. Try your best to find out what's going on before you hipfire comments about it. Don't downplay consequences for actual bad behaviour as petty fights or silly drama. Have the restraint to just say nothing when you don't feel qualified to weigh in.

And keep those basic statistics in mind. In a group full of queer people, most accusers will also be queer. James fucking Somerton is queer, for that matter, and for years, his fans and himself fought legitimate plagiarism accusations as just homophobia and defamed victims of his plagiarism as "hating gays and wanting him dead".

Sometimes, you gotta take a deep breath, swallow that initial reflex to bite back, and think it through.

Thank you.

Opinions expressed here are my own and represent nobody else's. Not an official position of Eldritch Café. Speaking personally, not in any capacity as a moderator.

#MastoMod

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