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.
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.
I thought the whole based/cringe thing was just zoomer slang?
Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.
Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don’t know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.
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”
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
Why is this article a problem? Seems like a good thing to keep in mind - federation and using open source software doesn’t mean you’re private.
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.
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.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned is that ubuntubuzz.com is about the Linux distro, and it’s the first hit for “Ubuntu buzz”. I’d definitely interpret ubuntu.buzz to be about Linux, at least if I didn’t check the about page.