Rich Felker
Did Fosstodon ever own up to the nazi mod fuckup and fully apologize and set out a plan to do better?
Or did they leave it with digging in on "y'all should have been nicer to our admins when complaining about the nazi"?
Need to figure out if I should follow up and move the musl account.
aburka 🫣
@dalias the two admins left, and this is what the new admin said https://hub.fosstodon.org/fosstodon-community-statement
Rich Felker
@aburka Yeah that's the one I saw and it's this paragraph that's grossly inappropriate and makes it a non-apology:
"I also need to state that our former admins were treated poorly and that this isn’t okay. Our moderators are bound by our Code of Conduct (CoC). This means that they are responsible for upholding it, but protected by it as well."
Someone who is carrying water for a nazi who has infiltrated a position of authority and is using that to abuse people is NOT ENTITLED TO ANY PROTECTION.
Rich Felker
@aburka And I say "carrying water for" because it would be different if they'd been like "holy shit, we had no idea, we've banned him now and are reaching out to all his victims to make things right" - no one would have "harassed" them then.
But as soon as you're like "naw he's cool he's my friend" or whatever, you forfeit any entitlement not to be treated like the shitstain you are.
aburka 🫣
@dalias yeah, it was really weird to see them say "well we haven't seen him do any nazi things while moderating? 🤷" like... folks can be evil *and* subtle, and going with the nazi bar analogy it doesn't even matter
Rich Felker
@aburka The right response if they haven't seen it is:
"This is an extremely serious allegation. If it checks out true, he will be removed as an admin and banned from the instance, and we will be conducting an investigation into all moderation actions he took part in and reaching out to anyone who may have been harmed. In the interest of user safety, his access to admin/mod functions has been suspended and will not be restored unless the allegations turn out to have been entirely fabricated."
Gina
@dalias @aburka New admin here. Jup, this is what it should have been. Which is what we aim for in the future.
Rich Felker
@Gina @aburka This post seems to contradict that and be really hostile: https://fosstodon.org/@Gina/114468588409602373
Have you changed your mind and realized that was a really bad take?
Gina
@dalias @aburka I'm not sure I understand your contradiction, nor do I see any hostility? My post basically highlighted the tension in a rule in our CoC (no advocacy). I don't see how that would be a bad take.
Not really in the mood to deal with a bad faith argument either. As said before, we have a whole new team that's committed to keeping Fosstodon a welcoming place. When they're ready we'll have a broader discussion on how to achieve this.
Rich Felker
@Gina @aburka If a policy on your instance is harming a members of a marginalized group, a "no advocacy" rule inherently means you're not allowed to discuss or try to change that harm. It protects the status quo of whatever harm is happening. And in the case of the nazi mod, it meant raising the issue would be a "CoC violation". THAT IS NOT WHAT A COC IS FOR.
aburka 🫣
@dalias @Gina yeah it's the classic civility trap where abusers or oppressors stay calm while doing bad shit, so anyone who speaks up is labeled the bad guy for making a scene. Kudos to you for trying to write the ship, but "no politics"/"no advocacy" is not going to work
Gina
@aburka @dalias I'm open to discussing the outcome of the no advocacy rule with the team, but we will not be changing the no politics rule. Yes FOSS is inherently political, which is fine to discuss, but not all politics is FOSS related.
Rich Felker
@Gina @aburka All politics affect the people who participate in FOSS, and *who can participate* and who can't.
I'm open to staying if you're actually going to work on figuring out what went wrong and enacting change, but if you're just going to pretend like you handled this right, I don't think it's tenable to remain on the instance where the project is implicitly endorsing it.
(And where followers whose instances are rightly concerned about the "nazi bar effect" are being lost because their instance defederates.)
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