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.
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.
All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there’s actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I’m wrong.
Pulling out the banhammer and limiting almost 10k users for a disagreement between admins feels childish, imho. They could’ve just as well blocked just the admin of firefish.social from interacting with mastodon.art users. If I were on mastodon.art, I’d be migrating to space with saner administration.
Edit: Clarity.
All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there’s actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I’m wrong.
You know, it reminds me of that as well but I have an opposite take. The forums I was most active on in the early 2000s were generally ones that had split from larger ones and had became smaller but much stronger and more personal communities as a result. You had the luxury of breaking off precisely because there was no expectation that one community would ever have a monopoly for a topic. Maybe my experience is unique, I don’t know.
I can’t speak for the specific situation here because I don’t know anything about these instances. But the ability for people to split off after a terminal disagreement has generally struck me as a strong point to the voluntary federation we have.
It’s not beef between two admins. Mastodon.art is strictly a “safes pace”, so the admin choses what’s safe.
Obviously, an instance admin having no issues with racism is a big fucking red flag about how they mod their instance.
In order to protect their instance and people on it, it’s safer to defederate, than count “strikes” and send warnings.
I really don’t think the firefish admin “has no issues with racism”. The “evidence” there is that Kainoa (the admin) boosted a link to an Electric Frontier Foundation page sent by Eris. I think that’s a ridiculous conclusion to make.
People say that this Eris person has posted some racist shit.
If they are allowed to be a racist shit on Firefish (even get boosted by admin, even though it’s an article, but an acknowledgement nevertheless), I can see how the .art admin can assume that it’s the wild west there.
If we’re stating opinions, I do not think that’s a ridiculous conclusion to make.
How do you know that the Firefish admin was actually aware of any racist posts? That’s quite the jump to conclusion.
The actual issue is, that as an instance admin who had previously been in the loop for some time with #fediblock and other channels in which admins share this kind of info, folks expected him to already have disqordia blocked.
Also, it seems from his posts elsewhere that he actually was aware and didn’t care. Ample reason to defederate from .art’s perspective. (Firefish.social has subsequently silenced but not blocked disqordia)
All of this is relatively routine, the screenshot fabrication thing more unusual.
He has been informed, and took no action. No jumps anywhere.
- No, he was just de-federated with absolutely NO previous communication.
- There is still no real proof that Eris actually is racist at all. Everything is always “someone said/claims”.
- That’s false.
- Don’t need proof, the admin can use their own judgement. This is not a faderal trial. It seems that ~30k poeple on .art trusts the admin’s judgement.
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.
So I just went down the rabbit hole on this one and its a crazy situation. Basically .art is defederating FireFish.social because they don’t defederate another instance. But the FireFish admin appears to have doctored some screenshots. It just seems immature as fuck. Especially considering the thing that the .art admin was made about happened over a year prior.
I think it’s too hasty of a conclusion to say they were doctored, at least based on what I saw following the situation. There were suspicions/allegations of it, but no clear evidence.
Thread where calckey dev responds. https://firefish.social/notes/9hp49vhkce098zn8
calckey dev
Is it that person whose name starts with a K? That fellow blocked my server when I had innocently mentioned that the Fedi software I use also has all the features that they’re talking about. Of course, after spewing a whole gamut expletives and abusive words. Certainly didn’t miss out on anything.
If I were a user of that server, I would run away - AVOID servers where the admins can’t maintain their cool, remain calm and collected and take things personally - think of how they would react if you say something against a decision they make.
Ya that’s him. I think this might be a limitation of the fact theyre legit a 20 y/o in college. I’m revealing my biases but a lot of people I know really didn’t level out emotionally until their mid to late 20s, myself included.
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.
There were two screen shots. I saw them. At least one of them was doctored. That is all anybody knows. How are some people so certain which Admin doctored the screen shot?
Multiple people were able to reproduce this.
So, the assumption that the screenshot is fake is probably wrong.Altogether, please don’t take screenshots as proof of anything.
They are always subjective to how much you trust the source they are coming from.See https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/5ed98350-328b-42ff-8005-4137fea8642d for a more complete statement.
I was considering to move away from Pleroma into Firefish, but it looks like both of them are problematic projects…
If you like Pleroma but found it problematic, definitely check out Akkoma!
Is pleroma bad? What’s the deal there
Why fork Pleroma in the first place?
As many of you will be aware, back in 01/2022, there was something of a schism in the smallish group of Pleroma developers with no single cause in my eyes - it was the culmination of years of mounting tensions between two competing interest groups. Pleroma has ever been an uneasy alliance between “free speech” people and free software people, and as the project’s creator aligned more with the former group over time, it was only really a matter of time before something acted as a catalyst to break the alliance.
I shan’t elaborate too much on that schism here, but the catalyst was one developer who both aligned with the “free speech” group and refused to treat other developers with any sort of respect (whilst being a generally unpleasant person to boot) - this broke the developer group in two and spawned the short-lived “newroma” (see, at least I’m not that bad at naming).
[…]
Most of the developers that split off in the fork then went back to Pleroma, after a band-aid fix from the almost-never-present project creator.
I do not believe they have meaningfully reformed anything since the schism, and it’s naught but a power vacuum waiting for someone to take up the mantle of maintainer again - given the track record of the above, I do not trust that whoever ends up winning that power struggle will be someone I wish to side with.
Thus, I’m doing it myself. With blackjack and anime music.
— https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.html
I kept hearing about Akkoma but never really knew what it was. Thank you for sharing!
Well it was enough of an issue to cause yet another fork of Misskey to exist: https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/iceshrimp/commit/a3713af06ffb12b62b1145d08c79b811e9cdf112
The iceshrimp fork actually came before the thing with .art broke and seemingly had to do with issues internal to the calckey development community. It’s hard to say for sure what the situation was because most of the stuff on both sides was pretty vaguely stated.
