The Fedilore Otter 🦦
[THREAD] If you are queer (or are an admin who cares about the safety of your queer users), do yourself a favour and block Mastodon.Art.
This is their response to recent credible death threats against Furry.Engineer users.
To be very clear, the "racism and harassment" mentioned here is reporting serious and credible death threats against a Furry.Engineer user.
https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/on-instance-blocks-and-racism
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
A small postscript:
Attacking furries as a form of crypto-homophobia was pioneered by 4chan and is currently popular among the Qanon-right as part of the "litter boxes in highschool bathrooms" conspiracy theories.
Furry.Engineer is a small instance of a few hundred users. Mastodon.Art is one of the largest instances we have here.
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
I am only writing this thread because Curator decided to write a blog post attacking a small furry instance, weeks after this conflict ended and they had given her everything she had asked for.
While it's impossible to know what's in Curator's heart, it would be naive to ignore the pattern of furry-bashing associated with these blocklist organizations and the history of furry-bashing as a homophobic political strategy.
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
Screenshots of Mastodon.Art admin defending the death threats available here:
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
The Furry.Engineer user at the center of this conflict.
The one who was accused of "racism and harassment" for reporting death threats against himself.
He left the instance.
And it still wasn't good enough.
Causing harm to queer communities is the only goal of Mastodon.Art.
Everything else is an excuse to justify causing that harm.
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
I get that Mastodon.Art is a big instance and defederation is hard.
But the safety of your queer users is more important.
You don't need to start a fight. You don't need to get into the "drama".
But you do need to block Mastodon.Art.
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
Mastodon.art's admin has a long history of specifically targeting queer instances with lies about racism.
This continues to cause damage to queer communities, which are essential for survival in the face of international trans genocide.
But she does not target all queer instances equally, and uses this in her defence.
If you're out and passing (and usually wealthy and neurotypical), she's willing to use you as a shield instead of attacking you.
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
It is also important to understand that there is no level of apologizing or trying to make peace that will work to appease Mastodon.Art.
Tech.LGBT mods spent a month writing an extensive apology, because one of their admins made a comment about potential risks related to blocklists.
The apology was used as an excuse to further slander and direct harassment towards Tech.LGBT.
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
Mastodon.art still federates with Scholar.Social, the instance responsible for the death threats.
The Scholar.Social user who made the death threats is friends with the Mastodon.Art admin.
The death threats were specific, and revealed private information about the victim that made clear that they were in serious and immediate danger.
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