Embed Notice

Today… Has been a day…

Over the last 24 hours:

• Our instance is blocked for a reason that is both transphobic and pluralphobic toward the admins of this instance—a reason that also assumes that this is a single user instance. (It is not.)
• Our instance is targeted by a fediblock campaign accusing the admins of being “transmisogynistic”, in a manner that is also pluralphobic after we voice our opinion that a post she shares is dismissive of the marginalization of queer identities that do not fall within the realm of the gender binary. As an additional note, I would mention that using the audience of your Twitch stream as evidence for qualitative research study would be acceptable if the participants in the study had consented to being studied. Even flawed research studies can be fascinating in their results. What happened here is an example of a deeply flawed understanding of both the scientific method and statistical analysis, combined with datamining of people who did not consent to being part of such a study in the first place. If nothing else, it is a violation of many existing privacy laws.
• Our instance is blocked by disqordia after we call out the double standard they maintain of utilzing the fediblock hashtag while trolling others for using it. What is especially egregious about this incident is that we’ve done plenty of digging and found zero evidence of the behavior that spawned the fediblock campaign that disqordia’s admin team spread. The posts that were repeated contain screenshots that directly contradict the text that summarizes them. We are rather unsurprised we were blocked in response to this, but it is still rather disappointing that we weren’t at least consulted in advance since one of our users was rather fond of discussing things with disqordia’s userbase,

That last issue is especially close to home for us. If you take a look at the public MRF policies for this instance (there aren’t any beyond those because we value transparency), you’ll notice a staggering number of instances blocked for containing CSA and/or CSEM. That is a form of content that, if posted and unmoderated, we are entirely unaccepting of. (We acknowledge that bad actors exist and that mistakes can be made, especially on 18+ instances. But that isn’t what is going on here.) In the case of CSA, we took the deliberately expansive approach of rejecting instances hosting text-based discussions of desires or plans of pedophilic acts. The case of CSEM, well. That should be self-explanatory. Any instance that others have reported through the federated blocking API were prioritized for vetting in this manner.

In every case of any form of content we block, we have personally visited the instances in question, catalogued content that violated our policies, and documented the violation in MRF as we add the instance to the reject list. It doesn’t matter how fucked up someone tells us something is, although we do rather expect that there is some degree of truth to such reports. We have to verify for ourselves. Because as is the case with fediblock use, the FBA can be abused similarly. The degree of care with which we have crafted the policies of this instance (which comprise a living document that has seen several edits throughout the brief course of this instance being deployed) has resulted in a rather unusual configuration of both our bubble timeline and our defederation list.

So why do we care so much about refusal not being blocked? It comes down to two things:

1. refusal has never knowingly hosted CSA or CSEM. There have certainly been discussions of and posts of loli/shota/cub content, but that is not the same thing at all.
2. refusal’s stated goal, which folks would know if they bothered to ask instead of accuse, is to deliberately federate with instances that this instance (and most others) blocks, specifically for the purpose of performing outreach to minors on those instances to try to get them into safer situations online.

This might sound like a completely delusional plan that is bound to go spectacularly wrong. But as a system that ran with R18 scanlation circles as a teen due to how dreadfully fucked up our home lives were—many years ago now—we can assure you that refusal was not always alone in this philosophy. We felt especially comfortable chatting with a group of radical feminist manga lovers who were scanlating works by little-known mangaka that were deemed unlkely to ever see official English releases. And that was the safest place we ever were online or IRL growing up. Never once were we asked our age. Our identification as female was never called into question. And it just felt rather comfy.

Is that the kind of situation we think kids should be in? Hell no. But if kids’ lives are fucked up enough at home that they start hanging out on lolicon distribution sites as an escape from reality, banning refusal and any instances that might arise of a similar nature leaves only instances allowing the abuse of children as options for them to associate with. And that, in point of fact, is despicable. It places kids at greater risk than any viable alternative.

So yeah. Fediblock this instance if you want, I guess. But do know that we take our policies very fucking seriously. We are not refusal. But we respect the work of that instance. And the admins have our respect—and have earned our friendship—as a result.