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.
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.
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.
He has been informed, and took no action. No jumps anywhere.