cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6853479

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.

  •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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    10110 months ago

    I spent way more time than was warranted digging into this completely petty drama.

    Eris seems to have been widely blocked and defederated for using the word ‘based’ and for thinking ubuntu.buzz was about linux. I’m not sure what kind of perspective makes that a priority, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be one based in compassion or world experience. Half the people I’ve met who use the word ‘based’ have nothing to do with 4chan, they’re just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don’t think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.

    Defederation is an important feature, and people should be able to defederate from whoever they want. What isn’t okay, though, is people going out of their way to propagate pettiness as much as humanly possible. Eris seems a little rough around the edges, but I also get the impression that the folks interacting with her in all the overly dramatic nonsense I just read are not acting in remotely good faith. They resemble a twitter mob looking for somebody to hate on, taking zero interest in understanding or nuance. No thanks.

    •  bermuda   ( @bermuda@beehaw.org ) 
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      10 months ago

      Half the people I’ve met who use the word ‘based’ have nothing to do with 4chan, they’re just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don’t think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.

      Also probably important to note that even being connected to 4chan isn’t always a bad thing. The web (particularly youtubers) have made 4chan as a whole to be some boogeyman website full of hackers and nazis, but it’s a loosely connected web of forums (known as boards), many of which don’t have anything to do with another apart from being anonymous. It’s kind of like lemmy in that regard. I’ve browsed it in my time, and while it is definitely quite a toxic site, most if not all the toxicity originates from a select dozen-or-so boards, and only 3 or 4 of them are even popular (b, pol, r9k, x). Hell, if you go right now to /a/, you’ll probably just see a bunch of weebs discussing anime like any other forum.

      note: this isn’t to say 4chan is safe like beehaw. The whole culture of the site is very archaic and a lot of people on there are still there saying slurs and being generally offensive, but when you stay away from hellholes like /b/ or /pol/, I’ve seen worse on reddit.

      If some stranger on the street told me they used 4chan, without specifying what board, I mean I might be suspicious of which boards they’re using (depending on context clues) but it’s not a buzzword that translates to “white supremacist”

      • /vp/ used to be really good at good Pokemon info back in the Black/White days.

        That said - I haven’t been back in quite a while, but even back then you did occasionally see folks who obviously were from /b/ or /pol/ posting. I’m sure it’s probably gotten worse over the years, as people start growing out of 4chan…

    • I almost thought I had written your comment and completely forgot about it. No, I just almost made the exact comment and want that hour of my life back.

      If there was some over the top racist rant, I sure didn’t see it. And the admin pushing for the defederation sounds so bizarre. Bizarre is the best word I could come up with because “petty” makes me think it was like high school politics. This is closer to a grade school sandbox argument.

      The worst I saw was “defedfags” and it was used in a way that was meant to highlight how they never said anything offensive. Like saying, “If you thought what I said before was offensive, let’s see how you respond to something intended to be negative.”

      The crazy thing is that the decision is being made because the admin just liked a post. It’s not even because of the post content - which has nothing controversial and appeared maybe 8 times in my Lemmy/kbin feed yesterday.

      Editing to add that this is the article: https://kbin.social/search?q=wakeup+call

      • I don’t even see who posted an article in my feed unless I open up three post and look for it. I upvotes things all the time without knowing who posted them. I’m all about aggressively defending safe places and I don’t think they were out of line to defed, but I agree that this whole thing seems awfully overblown from what I’ve seen. The users deserve an explanation of the defed and why and the story should’ve ended there.

        • Generally, if someone’s being a total asshole so severely that they have to be yeeted with several thousand other unaware bystanders, I expect to see a bunch of examples within the first… 2, maybe 3, links.

          If someone can point me to a concise list of examples (actual data), I find it more disturbing that an admin on another server can yeet my account because they make noise on a discord server.I mean, yes, federating is a feature, but why even offer the ability to enroll users? Maybe for a group of friends, or something, but just rando users is nothing but a liability to everyone involved.

        •  jarfil   ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) 
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          10 months ago

          The article is not a problem.

          From what I seem to understand, the “problem” is that someone got accused of being a Nazi sympathizer because they boosted the article, that had been posted by someone accused of being a Nazi, which made the .art admin want to defederate from all of them due to some (not clear) previous history they might have… but it just happens that the “sympathizer” is also the developer of a relatively popular Fediverse project and instance, so by blocking them by association, they’re also by-association-by-association blocking a lot of people who couldn’t care less about who develops the software.

          If smells a bit like when people wouldn’t want to check out Lemmy because the Lemmy devs host a “tankie” instance.

          • I share your understanding.

            Also, setting aside the question of whether the user they boosted is a Nazi or not, anger over boosting a post made by a supposed Nazi seems a little misguided.

            If the post is a racist rant, sure, that’s a big problem. If the post is something innocuous, because Nazis have regular interests as well as hateful beliefs, I can imagine boosting it on my kbin account, where boosting exists. Because I don’t go check the post history of everybody I reply to or boost. I just boost good content. And the boosted post was an EFF article.

            Unless Mastodon is one of those places where you just follow people, and do not see anything from people you do not follow. Then the question of “is the person whose post they boosted a Nazi” is a lot more relevant. I don’t use Mastodon. On Lemmy and kbin I follow nobody and see stuff anyways because I subscribe to communities/magazines.

            • That’s the same theme of a reply I made yesterday. I read the article and might have even boosted it myself because as a fediverse citizen, I’m concerned about any government agency seizing an instance like this. The “well known racist” claim is demonstrably false, because I still don’t know who they are talking about nor would I know the person behind a username.

          • To be fair…

            There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

            I don’t like the Lemmy maintainers, and that was a big jump propelling me onto Kbin. It just made me feel squicky knowing that I was tacitly endorsing their software by using it when there was an alternative available that did exactly the same things. I also don’t like using communities on Lemmy.ml because the admins there have a history of removing stuff that doesn’t suit their political views.

            I don’t think these two situations are equivalent, mind, but I do think there is more weight behind “avoid using Lemmy” than “avoid using Calckey/Firefish”.

            • Kbin started as a Lemmy fork called “karab.in” (carbine in Polish). Not sure about the story behind that, but I didn’t like the sound of it. Now Kbin has been reimplemented in PHP, which is arguably a much worse choice for server software than Rust. Those two kept me away from it.

              But the kicker is: right now, we’re discussing this in a community hosted by Beehaw, which is running Lemmy, even if you can interact with it from your instance which is running Kbin.

              So as for endorsing one or another:

              • None of these instances have ads, so our content (for now) is about worthless.
              • Both instances have donation links… but if you haven’t donated, then you aren’t supporting either.
              • The devs for Lemmy and Kbin also have donation links, and you can support them by filing bugs, or better yet fixing some. If you haven’t… well, still not supporting either 🙂

              Using any of these without giving back, is not “endorsing” it, it’s mooching off of it! So if you dislike Lemmy more… why not mooch off of that one? 😛

              I think the case with Calckey is equivalent: whatever their ideology, as long as their work is OpenSource, just take it and use it for your own purpose. It does seem to be much weaker, though.

              BTW Lemmy.ml is a very weakly political instance, focused more on Lemmy development. The “tankie” one is Lemmygrad, which most sane instances have defederated from… except Lemmy.ml itself, but just stick to “subscribed” or “local” and you’ll be fine.

            • There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

              I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

              • I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest.

                I can relate to that. It usually isn’t a coin flip for me though. I’ll align with some technology over another because I truly can see an advantage. That technology might be the underdog from the beginning. Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin whereas all of them combined are the underdog for certain more well established social forums. I engage with all three (and others still), because I don’t know the future.

                • Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

                  There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

                  That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

        • The article wasn’t the problem, it’s more of a “A boosted B’s link and C thinks B is a racist, so C defederated their instance from A’s.”

          C seems… oversensitive and fragile, but I just tweeted (Xeeted?) that I want to watch Mitch McConnell’s brain melt on livestream so I’m probably not a good judge of how to properly behave on the internet.

          • Oh, I understand the tactics being used. I was implying that person c was obviously stalking person a and pounced the moment they did something less than perfect.

            My guess is there isn’t anything of substance, so person c’s sensitivity got amplified with time and obsessing over whatever is going on, leading them to overreact. But, not c has to double down if they want any chance of being taken seriously if a significant cause to defederate occurs.

    • I got around 5 links deep for each of the links in the admin’s post, and fuck if I know. There was an argumentative user, but they were articulate and thoughtful. Not dropping slurs or wasting space nonsense, but still bordering on “edgy”. The person pushing the defederation appeared to be bullying them and on a power trip.

      It was embarrassing. That’s all I took away. (My opinion can change if someone digs through the shitpiles of nothingness to pull up some actual naughty posts, but that’s not going to be me.)

  • Wow - bit overblown all in all. While it sounds like the quinoa guy is kinda a jerk, I’m not seeing any proof of racism on his part. He just boosted a legitimate news article (the Fediverse servers being seized that popped up yesterday) posted by this Eris character, who had been flagged as a racist troll in the past. This isn’t confirmed or denied in the various posts aside from a profile link on thebadplace.com - which has no information aside from a few racist tags on that profile (can’t tell who the profile is for).

    This sounds more like the admins got snippy at each other in off-site discord drama and decided to take their toys and go home. Interesting for the /popcorn, but hey, if mastodon.art doesn’t wanna play with firefish, that’s their decision, regardless of the reasoning, end of story.

  • I don’t get it why tge commenters are upsetti of the way .art admin cleans their house.

    If they smell anything fishy, it’s their duty to protect their instance’s users. It’s what is promised for joining .art.

    There’s a reson it’s such a humongous instance. Because the admin is doing a stelar job.

    It’s not to my taste, that’s why I’m on another instance. But my lord, leave people be.

    If the admin is doing such a poor job, the instance will collapse, and people will simply migrate.

    To me it looks like fragile egos are all around, and somehow get “offended” when defederation happens.

    Also, GIMP is both a slur and a shitty graphics software. I’d personally block it as well.

    • To me it looks like fragile egos are all around, and somehow get “offended” when defederation happens.

      i would imagine most people’s issue here is this seems to be more “extremely petty schoolhouse drama” than “actual thing worth defederating over”, especially when mastodon has better and more granular defederation tools at its disposal than lemmy or calckey

      • The way I see it (especially since regsitrations are “pls let me in”) .art is admin’s house.

        If they ask you not to wear shoes inside, you either abide or leave. Petty or not, that’s the rule.

        If they catch you or your friends with shoes inside, you and your friends are getting kicked out, since everybody else is barefoot/eating off the floor.

        There’s really nothing weird, petty or childish. You get a warning (suspension?) if you don’t fix the problem, you get defederated.

        “bUt mUh frEey speyCh” doesn’t work in a super-protective, highly moderated “safe space”.

        • There’s really nothing weird, petty or childish. You get a warning (suspension?) if you don’t fix the problem, you get defederated.

          the issue here is not that i’m telling them to not do things–i don’t care what they do or don’t do. what i’m pointing out here is that people probably find this really stupid because it has an identical structure to and is similarly frivolous looking to a 16-year-old making a 10 page callout post against an artist for drawing problematic height gap

          • Sure. But, reading the comments under the .art admins posts on .art, .art people don’t find it petty, nor stupid. You’d see that they are thankful. And they are the only people who are affected by the defederarion.

            I’m sorry to say, but it really does not matter what other people think. It’s like me, who has never been at your house, and never planning to be, thinking that your house rules are weird, arbitrary and petty. I’m also weirded out that you didn’t let that or this person in your house.

            Would you care about my opinion?

            • I’m sorry to say, but it really does not matter what other people think. It’s like me, who has never been at your house, and never planning to be, thinking that your house rules are weird, arbitrary and petty. I’m also weirded out that you didn’t let that or this person in your house.

              in a federated system necessarily yes it kind of does regardless of if you think that’s fair. we get shit for what we believe (and maintain) are extremely valid and straightforward reasons for defederating with a handful of not-malicious instances and that can impact who comes here and why. if you were to create an image of being–for lack of better wording–a messy bitch with a catty and overdramatic attitude (as many people seem to read this as being) your instance will gain that reputation, it will influence who your users are, and it can go so far as to be negatively reflected onto completely innocent users.

              now, if the mastodon.art person doesn’t care about that then they don’t care, and i’m again not saying that i care either way–it’s their website, they can do what they want–but the presumption that this is in a vacuum or absent consequences is silly. it’s not!

              • a messy bitch with a catty and overdramatic attitude

                literally the opinion of a handful of people. If that was true, the instance would collapse.

                There will always be people unhappy with something. You can’t please everyone. The .art admin chose to please people of their instance, instead of maintaining a “look” that is expected from randos on the internet.

                I’m 100% with the admin, and I’m glad the admin isn’t peer-pressured into being whatever people need them to be. Again, there’s a reason why the instance is so popular.

            • I remember artist tumblr in the 00’s. Participated, then moved over to twitter in the 10’s before I got sick of it. This looks like another continuation of that same community.

              They can do what they like, but this reeks of the exact same kind of drama and mobs that, for example, drives fanartists to attempting suicide because they painted a character’s skin a shade too light. (Zamii070, if you’re curious.)

              These sorts of communities form an echo chamber that, frankly, can be absolutely horrible for kids. Yeah, they can do what they want in their house, but I’m staying far the fuck away.

              •  Rin   ( @Rinnarrae@beehaw.org ) 
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                10 months ago

                I know you didn’t mean anything bad by it, but the person you mentioned in that fanartist example doesn’t like being associated with that as she doesn’t want it to be her legacy.

                • Sorry, rereading it and I think I was unclear. I’m saying that this community moved from tumblr, to twitter, and now to mastodon. I quit this community at the twitter stage when it became too detrimental to my mental health.

                  But this community uses moderation as one tool to enforce cliques, rather than to actually prevent abuse. Or, you could say, this community has a history of using moderation as a form of abuse.

                  Alongside that, this community has a history of inciting witch hunts over the most petty things. And they will be happy about what the moderators are doing within their own clique.

    •  Justin   ( @jlh@lemmy.jlh.name ) 
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      How are people starting drama over a FOSS program that has been around for 25 years? Gimp is free, open-source, and good software. People starting drama over that are looking for trouble.

      • Why is everyone calling it drama. How difficult it is to understand a dumb rule that says “no slurs”?

        “Gimp” is literally a slur. The makers were aware of it and did for the lulz. Now they’re denied an account in an incredibly moderated instance because the name is a slur and everyone’s “why the drama11??11”

        • I think you have a different view on the project from reality. According to Wikipedia, the name “The Gimp” is a Pulp Fiction reference. The people who came up with the name “The Gimp” don’t even work on Gimp anymore. They’re CEO and CTO of the company developing CockroachDB. To imply that the volunteers running Gimp’s social media are some slur-crazy edgelords is counter productive.

          I don’t think any people think of the slur when talking about the project, and I think this is a bunch of Twitter drama nonsense. If you want to change it, then join the project and change it, don’t harass volunteers.

          • A slur is a slur, no matter how you dress it.

            If I made a program named “Fag*ot”, I’m sure, nobody cared about my story how it’s just a bunch of sticks.

            If you want to change it, then join the project and change it

            That’s not how it works. But there’s an effort to fork the program and rename it.

            don’t harass volunteers

            The ‘harassment’: “can we join your instance?” - “no, your program name is a slur”.

      • Don’t want to be defederated? Don’t let chuds and bigots on your instance. It’s pretty simple.

        While this is the main reason for defederation, I think it’s important to recognize that humans are going to human and as of such you’re going to have defederation over extremely petty issues. In human history we’ve literally started wars over petty issues, costing countless lives - defederating is small stakes in comparison.

        With that being said I agree with other posters that defederation is a tool. Just like any other tool it will be used in ways not everyone expects. A hammer can be used as a can opener if you really want. Or as art. Or in an elaborate machine. Tools may be designed for a purpose, but humans are creative and you can’t enforce that tools are only used in certain ways.

    •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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      Defederation is a feature, not an issue. Bigots, racists, etc can be confined to servers that allow that behaviour without polluting friendly servers with their content.

    • I do think defederation is an important tool for the many pedophile, harassment or extremism oriented instances there are because of the fediverse’s decentralized nature. But it is an extreme action, and I don’t see it as a good immediate recourse when there’s issues with an admin or some users.

      • It can force those who disagree with defederating to find a new instance that has access to all the communities they want. It also makes onboarding new people significantly more complicated, as their choice of instance will drastically influence their feed.

        To be clear, I’m not arguing against defederation, just pointing out that it causes issues that need dealt with.

          • new users should always understand what they’re signing up for.

            I agree that defederation is a feature, but this in specific is a contradiction against what is the normal “it doesn’t matter what instance you sign up for” that gets said whenever discussion about onboarding new users for Lemmy, Mastodon, etc comes up.

            I run my own instances for both (partly to avoid this, and also because I quite enjoy self-hosting) but if I didn’t and wanted to get my friends onto the Fediverse, this would be something I’d have to take into consideration for them as I couldn’t expect them to possibly understand it.

            In reality, its more like “It doesn’t matter what instance you sign up for… unless there is someone/a community you want to follow on instance X which is defederated by instance Y and the only way around it is to either create multiple accounts (which most non-tech oriented people aren’t going to want to do) or pick a different instance as your main instance and manually move everything over since there are no migration tools for the most part”.

            In my opinion this is probably the number one reason why the Fediverse will never be mainstream, for better or for worse (though I’d be incredibly happy to be wrong about this).

            Again, I think defederation is a tool that needs to be present on the Fediverse for pretty obvious reasons but I do think that it is also a double edged sword.

          • Things change over time.

            For example - I want to see the broadest possible choice of content in my feed. I want to be able to interact with anywhere that’s not outright hateful and/or malicious. So when I was choosing an instance, finding a permissive (but not too permissive!) admin was important to me.

            But when Threads started making waves and the fedipact started becoming a thing that people were discussing, things changed out of left field.

            I still wanted to federate with Threads. I think fears of EEE are overblown; Facebook has to comply with the Digital Markets Act and guarantee third-party interoperability. EEE on the fediverse runs counter to EU law. Additionally, most of my friends are folks who don’t “get” the fediverse; I tried coaxing my fiance onto Mastodon and she lasted 1 day before going back to birdsite. She uses Threads actively now, and I’d love to be able to see her posts and interact with her without needing to sign up for Threads myself.

            I had hoped that the semi-permissive admins I’ve found would tolerate it, but a lot of them decided to draw the line and join the fedipact (including my Mastodon admin).

            Which now sucks - it feels like a bunch of bullies are trying to use intimidation to tell me where I can and can’t post. By threatening to defederate everywhere that’s not in the fedipact, there’s this feeling where now I can’t join a server that curates the way I want because if I do, I’ll be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. If I run my own server, there’s a good chance these other instances will use bots to catch that my server federates with Threads and pre-emptively defederate me.

            Defederation is used as a weapon and a way to bully other instances, which I really don’t like. I understand the need for defederation as a tool but it sucks seeing how easily it’s abused, and how you really can’t trust that admins of a server you join won’t be intimidated into compliance by these fedipact bullies.

            So now, if I want to like my fiance’s posts… I basically have to join Threads and help Zuck directly, or have an account elsewhere that basically can only federate with Threads. Thanks, fedipact.

            • Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.

              You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.

              Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.

    • This is what kept me off fediverse for a while. Reading about another incident like this.

      If your admins are adults about things and don’t overreact to every little thing, then that’s great. But sadly not everyone is mature like that.