Notices by e(Ag)le (silvereagle@furry.engineer)

The responses in the original thread spell out an ultimatum that some people refuse to work with anyone who criticizes TheBadSpace in any way:

I can hardly imagine someone from our team not supporting Ro

I have been helping Ro and that’s how people feel about it then I don’t wanna work with them

All for what? These "receipts" are SO benign: they say "innocent users are going to get caught in the drama" (they are, and have), and they boost someone saying blocklists are in general a case of good intentions poorly executed (they are).

None of this is, in any fucking way, racism or bigotry. This is a wholly uncontroversial take.

And yet, the outrage inside Tusky not only forced the community manager out, but made them issue this apology:

I am extremely sorry to anyone hurt by my thoughtless actions.

What thoughtless actions?! You were 100% right, and got yeeted for it.

That's fucked, right?

Reading through this thread and it certainly looks like someone either just got shitcanned from Tusky, or is about to be, for having leveled some very justified (and honestly, very benign) criticism of TheBadSpace blocklist.

I get flak for saying it, but there really is an ideological "cult" surrounding this project and the folks immediately running and supporting it. Any criticism of it, valid as it may be, is seen as bigotry, and since anything labeled "bigoted" is (often rightfully, but in this case, far too zealously) exterminate-on-sight in the Mastodon universe, it's far too easy to just designate the next target arbitrarily.

Folks are uninstalling apps, defederating from each other, ripping thousands of connections apart, calling each other heinous horrible things, all because we have differing opinions about how best to keep the Fediverse a safe and inclusive place.

I really think this is all getting out of hand.

I've been following this really closely, so let me spell out some assertions I hold to be true here.

NO, the post by the .lgbt mod was neither the first nor the most popular post calling out TheBadSpace. NO, the criticisms of the list were not rooted in, or in any way informed by, the race of the maintainer (Ro).

YES, shitty people capitalized on the drama to harass Ro, but NO person on .lgbt's staff condoned, encouraged, prompted, or supported this at any point.

NO, .lgbt is not "as bad as KiwiFarms"; such a comparison is abhorrent, given the very real lives destroyed by KF. Nobody who makes a claim like this should be taken seriously.

NO, folks are not "spreading lies" when suggesting that Ro's fediblock posts influence the contents of his own blocklist. Many of his "trusted" sources follow him closely and block on his command, and he revels in the indirect authority this gives him and the pain this causes anyone critical of him.

There is NO evidence whatsoever that supports an accusation that tech.lgbt's leadership was in any way involved in a harassment campaign against Ro or TheBadSpace. Further, there is NO reason to suspect that the instance is an unsafe one for any marginalized group.

Even if there was an interpersonal conflict between one instance's mod and the staff of another, is there any good reason whatsoever to sever tens of thousands of connections as punishment for that? FUCK NO.

Is there evidence that .art only holds smaller, more vulnerable instances to this standard while excusing far worse things from larger instances, on account of the revenue the larger instances represent? YES, in WelshPixie's own words.

What is happening is, to put it bluntly, a fucking travesty. It's a slap in the face to solidarity, to community, to the resilience of the Fediverse at large, and a warning sign to countless many to stay away.

@Amps The person who made that absurd, insensitive and frankly repulsive claim, Ro (also the one running TheBadSpace blocklist) actually doubled down on it this week.

This rhetoric is just unacceptable in a setting of healthy coexistence in a federated community like this. That it comes from someone who purports (and fundraises) to be building a safer space for people of color online is astonishing.

Masto.art's "curator", WelshPixie, is now flying off the handle yet again, feeling even more justified in severing connections with this entire server.

Why? It's simple: she's only ever done this kind of tactic against smaller instances that are largely progressive/leftist, and historically, because she's in charge of such a large instance relative to them, they've been understandably hurt and have bent over backwards to placate her. (Notably, she doesn't enforce these same standards against larger instances than hers, like .social, because there's too much money in it.)

This time, though, the instance bent over backwards for her, and it only made her angrier. She didn't want understanding or reconciliation, she wanted to force another instance to fire its staffers and was willing to use her whole instance as a cudgel to carry that out.

So now, folks are done with her shit, and I am VERY here for it.

If you're on Mastodon.art or tech.lgbt, one day this week you're going to wake up and you may well find yourself missing dozens upon dozens of people off your feed.

This is not because those people are bad people, or even because the instances they're on are bad instances with a long history of abuse. Neither instance is full of bad people, nor are they abusive in any material way.

This is because one person controlling one huge instance got red-hot with anger over a single situation and kept escalating it, using her platform and position to amplify her own anger. She long ago gave up trying to de-escalate, and now every post she sees just makes her angrier, but because of the way Mastodon works, she is single-handedly capable of severing countless thousands of interpersonal connections.

For my money, if this makes you fucking angry then it damn well should, but NOT at tech.lgbt. We're lucky they're even keeping the damn server running after all this.

Let me break this down for you fundamentally:

One of tech.lgbt's mods made a post telling people to be cautious of TheBadSpace after it wrongly caught tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ people in its blocklist.

The masto.art admin asserts, absent ANY proof, that this mod both knew that a black man was running the blocklist AND intended to stir up a flurry of racist abuse against this man. This has led her and others to lash out against the whole instance, saying unbelievable things like they're "as bad as KiwiFarms", and defederating from them completely.

The tech.lgbt admins dug into this, produced a huge write-up explaining every step of what happened, and in the end concluded that no, their mod's post was not the catalyst behind everyone getting upset about TheBadSpace, nor did their mod realize what a fucking minefield they had stepped into.

The masto.art curator looked at this long post, rejected it outright, and just called them racist some more.

@zorinlynx @david It's a very long story, but it basically boils down to "they don't like some of the mods, so they've extrapolated that into a condemnation of the entire instance and everyone on it"

@zorinlynx @david There absolutely isn't serious abuse coming from tech.lgbt. It's a quite calm place filled with quite decent folks.

This is all just a "principled" display of loyalty between various members of a community now famous for their heavy-handed moderation and blocklisting tactics as a means of exerting control on the parts of the Fediverse they don't directly control already.

Those same principles don't apply to larger instances like dot-social, who they still permit despite a huge subset of problematic users coming from there, simply because they're worth too much in terms of business to lose.

It's all just leftists-eating-other-leftists except manifested in powerful people who can sever tens of thousands of connections at a moment's notice and use that power to grind their personal axes.

@EppyNWS I've completely switched over to using Firefox as my daily driver. I've yet to find any workload for which it isn't well-suited, though there are some cases where Chromium extensions do make some workflows a little easier.

For those limited workflows, I just run a basically disconnected-from-everything Chrome instance.

Chrome: We're automatically opting you in to a new feature that sends your home address to advertisers but puts little asterisks over parts of it, and we're calling it Ultimate Privacy Protection

Firefox: We're encrypting every step of the DNS and HTTP connection process so nobody on the planet can know what you're doing online, because fuck anyone who would want to know

These two are not the same and should not be regarded as equals

@Neybulot @itsOasus I do the same with any link, stripping off the query string unless it's absolutely necessary for the link's operation.

All that UTM_SOURCE stuff is Google Analytics tracking from back when it was called Urchin Tracking Monitor.

Unreal.

The mastodon dot Art team got a taste of their own medicine in the form of a fediblock request against them, backed with receipts to boot, and to retaliate, they blocked the whole instance that assembled the receipts overnight, because of course they did.

By all accounts, the artisan.chat instance is one that would have a ton of commonality with the Dot Art instance, but one of their users and (former) mods maintained an account that consolidated the Wild West of Fediblock requests into nice neat paragraphs.

The Dot Art admins are holding their users hostage over this, threatening that until the maintainer of this list is demoderated, they'll punish the entire instance by suspending it.

Y'all, this has been called "cult-like" behavior before, but one server admin using their position to enforce moderators on a server they don't run is just...I don't even have words for it.

If you are or have friends on Dot Art please GET OFF.

It's hard to believe that we're still having this discussion, but more and more damage keeps being done.

This time, the mastodon dot art curator team (controlled by user Welshpixie) announced they're fully suspending tech.lgbt from their instance.

Why? Because in tech.lgbt's statement about all the recent bullshit, they very honestly came out and said they didn't have "consensus" amongst the mods for how to best respond to the TheBadSpace controversy.

The dot art instance, nothing if not bloodthirsty for blocking, decided this meant the whole instance and the thousands of users, a great deal of whom are from vulnerable groups themselves, were an "unsafe space" for BiPOC users.

This would be absurd and not worth anyone's time to debate, except that the dot art instance has tens of thousands of people on there, many of whom just want to see their art reach more folks and are unaware of all of this.

Please, if you're on there, find a new instance home. It's only getting worse.

Y'all, I can't even. The guy running this BadSpace blocklist has been handing out fediblock requests like candy tonight, one for pawb.fun and one for the instance I'm on. He's also doubled down on tech.lgbt being blocked and says it now will be "one of the most suspended instances in the database". All three because a small handful of users angered him personally by criticizing him.

I need y'all to realize this is everything that is wrong with blocklists encapsulated in one story. It's clear the folks who would want to control who tens of thousands of people can see online should never be able to. It's all personal grudges, angry vendettas carried out in the name of some righteous greater good, and if you go along with it you're enabling every bit of it.

It's unreal to think that groups like the Federation Safety Enhancement Project are (or were) pushing this list, run by this person, as the authoritative source of blocklist information for instances.

If I seem furious about this, it's because I FUCKING AM.

I'm in a ton of communities with people who live with varying degrees of autism spectrum disorder, who have the kindest warmest hearts of anyone you've ever seen, who would fight for you no matter what and have never ever tried to take your rights away, but who can't socialize to save their lives, and don't know (or don't care) about the questions you're "not supposed to ask" or the things you're "not supposed to say", or they've seen it for what it is, which is an unwinnable arbitrary game of unspoken cues that they could never get an upper hand on if they tried. I'm one of those people myself.

These are NOT your enemies.

They're also easy people for powerful influencers to call out and pick on, and about the easiest folks to have their spirits and lives crushed by the resulting backlash.

If you don't have space in your heart for patience and consideration with folks, you are doing the movement a BIG disservice.

There is no one with a bigger blind spot for neurodivergence than the kind of unforgiving, ruthless leftist who will put you on very public blast and send their followers after you for saying something that you "should have known" could be interpreted the wrong way by certain people.

Myself and so many of my peers have been caught up in this so many times that I'm convinced you are no comrade of mine if you don't sincerely understand that socializing is fucking hard on a good day, and when you have social challenges it can be damn near impossible to say exactly the perfect thing every time.

If you create an unwinnable minefield situation for any neurodivergent person around you and you aren't willing to discuss things with them and, more importantly, to forgive people with good hearts who say the wrong thing, then you are, to borrow your own language, an ableist fuck.

Aaaaand there's the other shoe dropping on the grift

Anyone who is in any way critical of my leadership or actions or moderation or motives is not only wrong but also a racist and owes it back to me in cash

If leftists have one weakness it's their vulnerability to loud grifters who wield the language of progressivism to not only make themselves totally immune to even the most well-sourced and level-headed of criticism, but to extract money and influence from those who either buy it or feel guilty enough to second-guess themselves.

You're not a bad leftist if this shit rubs you the wrong way.

I posted about switching to Firefox as my "daily driver" browser as a little tiny step away from Chromium browser hegemony, and I had a ton of people in the replies suggesting I should just use Brave or Edge or Opera or Vivaldi instead.

I'm a little concerned that people don't realize just how pervasive this problem is. Every single one of those sits on top of the Chromium codebase.