Notices by The Fedilore Otter 🦦 (fedilore@mastodon.social)

I think I agree basically 100% with this.

Admins should be very quick to block automated accounts that might increase exposure of their users or instance to a broader-than-organic audience.

https://old.mermaid.town/@futzle/115552478770474803

The person in charge of AT Proto has been having a meltdown for the last two days.

That's just not true about AT Proto.

Moderation on AT Proto is only vaguely possible for Bluesky to do, because they're the vast majority of users on the platform.

Not only is distributed "moderation" on AT Proto not real, but what little moderation that does exist will stop working if the platform does become decentralized.

Labels are not moderation.

Labels are labels.

The Fediverse doesn't need Eugen Rochko to ban Jessie Singal for us.

We can do it ourselves.

We have sovereignty over our own servers, and we can moderate how we want.

And according to the person in charge of the protocol, this isn't a Bluesky problem. It's a protocol problem.

Bluesky isn't broken. AT Proto was designed this way on purpose.

Which is true.

TLDR: It's a protocol made by transphobes to do transphobia.

Bluesky refuses to moderate anti-trans hate accounts, but does ban trans women for "harassment" if they post about how those accounts are bad.

Other recent Bluesky blowups include:

- Banning trans women for making Charlie Kirk jokes.

- Banning trans women for saying they "wish ill" towards JK Rowling.

- Inviting JD Vance to join Bluesky.

(ActivityPub does fix this, tho.)

Jay, again, who is in charge of the protocol, understands how it works.

She's linked to an article that lays out in substantial detail why AT Proto is unsafe by design, and why moderation on AT Proto is necessarily pretend.

There were different ways to design the protocol. And they chose the way that hurts trans people the most.

https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhui2zbxk2b

I just want to highlight one more big element of this that doesn't get said enough.

WelshPixie decided to harass a random trans woman using Ro's blocklist two days ago, right in the middle of a huge, government-led wave of conspiracy theories about trans women.

Fox News conservatives were calling for the mass arrest or mass killings of trans people.

This is not a coincidence. These harassment campaigns fairly often line up with major attacks against trans people.

The cruelty is the point.

For anybody who isn't deep into the protocols, AT Proto (Bluesky) has some very fundamental security flaws baked right into the design of the protocol.

AT Proto is designed from the ground up to make privacy impossible.

You can't make private posts.

You can't have a private account.

The protocol is designed to make it literally impossible to defederate Nazis.

That is the fundamental design choice that everything else in the protocol is built around.

IFTAS are passing around a policy letter, arguing that ActivityPub and Bluesky are basically the same thing, so nobody on Fedi should ever criticize Bluesky.

🙄

I could point to the Antioch shooter, and weave some bullshit about Black people being dangerous and antisemitic.

That would obviously be dishonest, and intentionally racist.

He was a Black man radicalized by white-supremacist and Nazi content online.

He didn't become a murderer because he was Black. He became a murderer in spite of being Black.

He very clearly wasn't a Black nationalist, because his manifesto was full of very explicit anti-Black racism.

Mass shootings are overwhelmingly done by far-right cishet white men.

There's a whole network of Telegram channels, grooming these guys into terrorists.

There's rules. There's rituals. They keep score. They reference shooters who've come before them.

There are literally teams in place to provide editing and distribution help with their manifestos.

This is an explicitly racist, explicitly transphobic, funded, organized effort of actual Nazis.

It's obviously transphobic to blame the Minneapolis shooting on being a trans woman.

Just like it's obviously racist to blame the Antioch shooting on Blackness.

The Minneapolis shooter was radicalized by white-supremacist and Nazi content online.

She didn't become a murderer because she was trans. She became a murderer in spite of being trans.

Her manifesto was explicitly transphobic.

She detransitioned as a result of her radicalization.

I spend a lot of time keeping up with anti-fascist research.

For more than a decade, American fascist groups have been trying to promote a conspiracy theory (that never got too much traction) that mass shootings were caused by antidepressants.

It's not super complicated why.

Nazis are shooting up schools.

To direct attention away from guns and fascism, they decided to spread fear about a group of disabled people.

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/28/school-shooting-kennedy-antidepressants-claim

Other marginalized peoples trying to distract from the bigotry targeting them, by redirecting that hatred towards queer people, is also not new.

And while I get having sympathy towards people trying to do this sort of thing to take the targets off their own backs:

- It's not going to make the Nazis magically decide not to hate you.

- It is not justified, and we cannot allow people to justify it.

(Yes, these conspiracy theories are specifically about trans women.

Trans men don't exist in fascist conspiracy theories.

Necessarily, every trans man or detransitioner or cis person who makes a joke becomes a trans woman to anybody dumb enough to fall for a Nazi meme on Facebook.)

In 2023, that conspiracy theory suddenly flipped into a conspiracy theory that mass shootings are caused by trans women.

Suddenly it started getting a lot more traction.

Like, a lot more traction.

Period reminder that the "Nazi phase" thing is an intentionally transphobic myth.

Data is limited, but based on the data we do have it's pretty clear that queer people are among the most progressive demographics in the country.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls