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mastodon.art defederating calckey firefish social. Cites behavior of lead project dev

mastodon.art has decided to suspend firefish.social from their instance due to issues with its administrator. The administrator of firefish.social was found to be boosting posts from a known harasser on another instance. mastodon.art takes a firm stance against racism and suspending full instances in these situations is part of their policy as a safe space. The known harasser has a history of using slurs, harassment, and editing screenshots to spread misinformation. However, the administrator of firefish.social has now forged a screenshot to paint mastodon.art in a negative light.

39 comments
  • god fediverse drama is so dumb

    • Mastodon drama tends to have another level of hysteria to it caused by the amount "context collapse" the platform creates. There's no search or quoting posts or anything that can really "go viral" ... so news only spreads through rumours and "chinese whispers". Which means once some drama goes viral, any one conversation about it is mostly held in the dark, with people mostly speculating based off of some rumour they heard that has gone through who knows how many cycles of whispers, but because of the uncertainty, and the additional gatekeeping culture of outing "the bad people", a rather elevated energy quickly ensues where people desperately want to know what's going on, sometimes because their instance is implicated which makes it pretty personal, and want something (ie drama) to happen all to the point of convincing themselves that they do know what happened and what needs to be done.

      Behind all of that is the stark reality of the context collapse which means that anyone who actually wants to know what's happening will find it strikingly or prohibitively difficult to actually find out, which often gets to the point that people will think they saw the evidence and truly know but will disagree or not actually have the evidence they think they do.

      The more I see of it, and hear of the issues BIPOC people have had for similar-ish reasons, the more I think mastodon's design of "safety" and "anti-virality" through limited feature sets is actually an awkward middle ground rather than a good solution.

  • I just read up on all of this drama and it's quite dumb, IMO. I don't know why I did this to myself, but I figured I'd write a summary here. I apologize if this comes off as overly negative, I tried to avoid it as much as a could but it was kinda like watching an episode of Real Housewives of the Fediverse.

    There's this trans woman named Eris who seems like a jerk, they use some channer speak and are aggressive. There's this other cis white dude named Puf who goes on and on about Eris being anti-black but can only provide screenshots to Eris being a bit of a dick, and seems to have digitally stalked Eris in order to try to find any possible way to discredit them. They've both circled the wagons with their respective followers, with one camp calling the other anti-trans and the other camp calling the first anti-black. In reality, Eris is a jerk and Puf is psychotic and the fediverse would probably be better without either of them, but is pretty obvious that neither of them are racist or transphobic.

    I have no idea why firefish.social would be suspended because one of their admins boosted a random, unrelated post that Eris made. It's like a big self-defeating, incestuous left-wing witch hunt.

  • I posted a medium-short summary elsewhere with a couple of links for folks looking for slightly more context.

    I don't think the eris or defederation things are Huge News in themselves, but if it's true he doctored a screenshot to make the .art admin look bad, that's not a good look for a lead deve/flagship instance admin.

    .art is an influential leader in community safety/moderation standards in the fediverse; their standards for federation are moderately high, and probably higher than folks on many lemmy instances would likely agree with. But it feels like the firefish guy has possibly a pattern of not doing his homework about things in general?

    Obviously the big question is, did he actually doctor screenshots and if so, WTF, man.

  • Damn. I was considering checking out Calckey...

    I mean there are probably other instances but it still sucks

39 comments