ABrockwell @aebrockwell@social.cleverlibre.org

I bought stress balls the other day, and they're totally working. Every time I throw them at a person stressing me out, I feel instantly relieved.

@murshedz Respectfully, I believe it's time for everyone who does not want to legitimize #Nazis to leave #Twitter. I understand the importance of Twitter. I spent more than a decade there as an active participant. But #ElonMusk is dangerous and powerful, and IMO everyone with a "but" about leaving should take a good look at that "but" in the full light of #history

So energizing to see all this activity after just a few hours of launching the United Federation of Instances repo.

https://gitlab.com/ufoi/constitution

We already have 7 discussions going on and 2 merge requests for the proposal... The more people keep getting involved the more energy I have to put more into it. Cant wait to finish a draft of the bylaws.

#UFoI #UFI @ufoi

I should probably know better than to wade into such a contentious topic as a mastodon newbie. Yet here I am, responding to a story titled: "Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, Caves to Nazi's Agenda"

https://qoto.org/@freemo/109393989962731002

I am new to QOTO, so I'll let Mr. Freeman handle the historical details, and I hope that people listen and unblock QOTO, which I have found to be a wonderful server run by impassioned moderators, including Mr. Freeman. My concerns are more basic and technical. I'm trying to understand the purpose of defederation. As I understand it, this dispute ultimately comes down to how to respond to bad actors, and there are different mechanisms for different levels of bad activity.

To be clear: any of the below could be completely wrong! Please, do not rely on this as an authoritative explanation of mastodon, in case I get out over the front of my skis and make too many assumptions.

## How Mastodon Works

Mastodon works because completely independent servers are all running compatible software that speaks "ActivityPub," and that is used to exchange activities like posts and comments and follows between servers. If any user of serverA follows any user of serverB, then serverA gets a copy of posts from serverB to display in serverA's "Home" view for that user. This connection between serverA and serverB is "federation," and some servers are federated with many other servers, while some are federated with only a few, perhaps because they have very few users who are interested in mostly other users on their same server.

Poking around instances.social, it seems I can click on any server and find out how many "connections" it has, which I believe to be a measure of how thoroughly that server is federated. Sorting the list by users, I see mastodon.social at the top with 879,988 users and 34,623 connections, while mstdn.party at #11 has 39,365 users but only 9,610 connections. QOTO is in position 20 with 25,130 users and 24,529 connections. In fact, if I sort the list of instances by connections, QOTO is sixth, so it seems to be "well-federated" as I understand it.

So far, all technical, but already I see issues. Even in the top-20 listing, when I limited the list to servers with at least 25,000 users, I recognized one server that I have seen on nearly every server's "About" page as a blocked server. That brings us almost immediately to questions of moderation.

## Moderation

Bad actors are one of the biggest challenges facing any internet service. The functionality of email has been almost completely ruined by spammers, victims of "419 scams" send many millions of dollars to overseas scammers every year, comment sections on websites have gone almost completely extinct as site owners do cost/benefit analysis and realize they're spending much more time moderating comments as they're deriving value from the comments that remain, and the world's richest oligarch just set fire to $100 billion of his money because he refused to accept what Twitter was saying about bots, and still his every tweet has fake crypto giveaways among the first few replies. Worse than any of that is targeted harassment, as some people don't respond to any of the normal mechanisms of social pressure intended to keep them for pursuing their victims to hurt them.

These are human issues, not technical issues, which is why I think any solutions cannot be only technical. These issues have always existed, but the internet pushes everyone and everything together, acting as a force multiplier, making bad intentions easier to put into action, and harder to resist or avoid.

I should note here that I am a cisgender man best described as "white," so I know about targeted harassment in a detached sense, but have never been the target of such activity. This will obviously lend my discussion of this horrific behavior a detached tone some might see as inappropriate to the subject. I 100% support those targeted, and I am 100% aligned against those would harm or threaten to harm others in any way, especially on the basis of who they are, rather than in response to statements or actions. (Please read this as: "If you're a nazi, I'll stand by and let someone punch you and not feel bad about it at all.")

Like most internet-connected software in the 21st century, mastodon includes mechanisms for responding to both bad actions and bad actors.

Starting at the local level, if a user on your server says something that you believe violates the rules of your server, you can bring it to the attention of a moderator and they should respond appropriately. Depending on the server, a bad *action* might result in a notice and the post or comment in question being deleted, while an egregiously-bad action, or a pattern of bad actions that indicate a bad *actor*, might result in that user's account being suspended or terminated. If you find content you consider to be objectionable, but the moderators of your server don't agree it is worthy of moderator action, you still have a few choices: you can mute the user so you don't see their posts or comments, you can block them so that they can't comment on your posts, or you can leave the server entirely and find another one more to your linking. The design of mastodon means that your list of followed and followers will move with you, but your posts and comments will not, so it's not a completely transparent move, but it's not the end of the world, either.

If the user is not local to you, meaning you're on serverA, while they are on serverB, that's where things get more difficult. You have the same mechanisms available to you: you can mute the user or block the user, and even report the user. When you report a user from another server, the message goes to your own server moderators as well as (optionally) the moderators of the other server. And then what? It depend on both your moderators and the moderators of that other server.

Let's say that other server's moderators are horrible trolls, or that the other server in question is a self-server, so that the person spamming or harassing you *is* their own moderator. You have one additional mechanism, which is that you can "Block domain badactor.antisocial" entirely. For example, there are servers out there devoted to trolling, or that don't abide by laws effective in the US and Europe, or that are just gross.

So far all moderation choices are up to you. If you find people of a certain political leaning intolerable, you can block domains known to host them. If one particular person gets under your skin, you can block them. If you're browsing the "Federated" timeline to see all posts from everywhere and see something you can't believe is even allowed to exist on the internet, you can block either the user or the entire domain as you feel is appropriate.

But there's another level of moderation possible, and that involves server admins.

## Local vs Global

I'll use QOTO as an example, since that's where I am. QOTO has strict policies against hate speech and harassment. There are several moderators who spend a lot of time reviewing content on QOTO, and enforcing the rules. The "Local" timeline is full of friendly positive content and a lot of nerdery. Anything that seems even a little bit like hate speech or harassment can be reported and will be dealt with, and they'll kick people off the server who aren't willing to be kind. QOTO has long been a haven for people in the LGBT community, in large part because of somewhat-heavy moderation at a time when some LGBT people were being targeted specifically on mastodon. As a server, QOTO is a great place to be.

But all of that describes the "Local" experience. If you stay on the "Home" (people you've chosen to follow) and "Local" (people on your server) timelines, QOTO is pleasant and agreeable and interesting and fun, and most of all, well-moderate.

If you switch to the "Federated" (global) timeline, things can get very ugly very quickly. That's because QOTO has a policy against de-federating.

Server admins have four options for moderating users, and three options for moderating entire servers. The user actions come into play when, for example, I report something another QOTO user posted, and the QOTO moderators have to decide what to do with that. They might mark the user as sensitive, so that any images that user posts is automatically put behind a content warning. They might freeze the account to prevent any further posts or comments by that user. They might "silence" or "limit" the user so that only people who've chosen to follow them see anything they post. Or they might suspend the user, which effectively deletes their account completely.

The server options are similar, but more consequential. A moderator on serverA can choose to "reject media" from serverB, so that no images of any kind from that server show up locally. They can "silence" or "limit" that server so that nothing from any user on serverB shows up except for people on serverA already following them. Or they can suspend or block that server entirely, an action commonly called defederation.

This last option seems very extreme to me. It is literally the most extreme option available, and can have unforeseen consequences many server moderators don't seem to be considering. It is such an extreme option that QOTO has a policy of only blocking servers that engage in technical attacks or make CSAM available. They've silenced only four servers, mostly in response to dedicated harassment of LGBT people on QOTO condoned by those server moderators. For the most part QOTO focuses on local moderation and makes a domain blocklist available to all users who wish to start with a list of 123 blocked domains.

https://qoto.org/@freemo/109303687938265107

While QOTO takes a very hands-off approach to inter-server moderation, leaving decisions in the hands of individual QOTO users, some servers lean very hard in the other direction, blocking domains not just for things that have happened, but for things that they believe might happen in the future, or because a server chooses not to participate in the daily two-minute hate against another server.

## What Defederation Does

To be clear about why defederation is a big deal, I can give an example, naming names. I am on qoto.org, while a very good friend of mine who is pretty big in the tabletop gaming world was on tabletop.social. It turns out that tabletop.social blocks qoto.org for reasons seemingly related to the ongoing issue described in the first link in this post. As my friend put it when I mentioned this to him, they'll block anyone for anything. Because his server blocked my server, he couldn't add me as a friend. He couldn't search for me by tag or URL. He couldn't see any of my posts unless he logged out of mastodon. I could see him, and I tried to follow him, hoping that would open up new options for him, but he never even saw my follow request, and his account was set to require approval for following. Like I said, he's pretty big in the tabletop gaming world.

He and I are the best of friends, and neither of us are bad actors in any way. In fact, we're both supporters of LGBT people personally, and where applicable, professionally, so it seems really strange that we could not communicate at all because of (apparently) issues related to LGBT people. None of the 3.15K users (870 active) on tabletop.social could interact in any way, shape, or form with any of the 25.2K users (8.53K active) on qoto.org. There was no accusation of bad behavior by me, or by any other QOTO user, just a presumptive domain-wide ban. When I dug into why this ban was in place--which was difficult, since nobody at tabletop.social could even see my comments asking questions--I came across comments from some years back suggesting that QOTO's unwillingness to block a third domain meant that QOTO should be blocked. This got QOTO put onto a blocklist shared by a number of sites.

I struggle to follow this reasoning. If someone on tabletop.social were being awful, I would block that person. If multiple people on tabletop.social were being awful, to the point that I began to suspect the domain existed for the purpose of being awful, I would block that domain. And even though I'm only acting for myself, not every user of my server, I can't imagine blocking tabletop.social because they refuse to block some other domain I really dislike. Let's say there was a domain called badactors.antisocial that existed primarily for the purpose of harassment. I would block them for myself, no problem. I might even, depending on just what sort of harassment that server was engaged in, block them at the domain level if I were a domain moderator. But I don't understand what would make someone then go around to other servers and demand that they also block badactors.antisocial. That tabletop.social users might see posts from badactors.antisocial on their timelines doesn't affect me or my server at all!

An ungracious person might view it as "I hate anybody unwilling to hate the people I hate," but surely there has to be more to it than that, right? I can think of very few possibilities. Four, really.

## Why Defederate?

First, it could be exactly that. Authoritarians can be found all along the political spectrum, and to some extend this feels a bit like left-wing authoritarianism. For example, mastodon.art recently chose to block QOTO and lists as the reason "Federates with instances that violate our ToS/CoC (such as Gab, Kiwifarms.cc, freespeechextremist.com, etc.)" That sounds a lot like "we block these servers, and any servers that won't also block these servers, etc." It sounds like the "two-minute hate" issue. And to be clear, those servers are terrible, and I wouldn't fault anyone for blocking them either individually or even on a server level. I blocked two of those myself individually, and the third doesn't seem to exist anymore.

However, it could be a second reason: maybe servers blocking QOTO don't understand the ramifications of what they're doing. In describing the action, the owner of mastodon.art seemed to believe they weren't affecting anybody who already followed someone, but QOTO is listed as "Suspended," not "Limited," so no, they've completely blocked any interaction with anybody from QOTO for all of their users, possibly because they don't understand the difference. Again, the fact that QOTO doesn't block badactors.antisocial doesn't mean that badactors.antisocial content shows up on tabletop.social or mastodon.art! If those servers block badactors.antisocial, then badactors.antisocial content won't show up, so the reason for the preemptive blocking seems to be based on ignorance. There are two more possibilities, though.

A third option is that there may be one way that content from badactors.antisocial *might* show up on a site that has blocked that domain. I haven't experimented to be sure, and it seems from reading comment threads that others haven't either, but there's a widespread belief that if someone "boosts" a post from badactors.antisocial, then that boosted post could show up even on a server that has blocked the domain, because the "boost" means that the content is now coming from the other server. I am not sure whether this is the case, but let's say it is. Then I would ask, has this happened? Are there people on QOTO boosting horrible posts from badactors.antisocial? If so, report them to the QOTO moderators, who should take action! If they don't take action against the users boosting bad content, then you have a valid reason to take action against QOTO. Nobody in the comment threads seems to be 100% sure whether boosting posts from blocked domains results in them appearing, so it seems clear that even the first step in this chain has not happened, making a block against QOTO seem very premature at best.

Finally, the only other reason I can think of is that people have misunderstood QOTO's heavy emphasis on "academic freedom" and confused it with the "free speech" label hateful people often use to describe their hate-filled nastiness. Even though QOTO clearly states that they don't permit hate speech or harassment, and very clearly moderate QOTO, people elsewhere seem to believe that QOTO is "completely unmoderated," and a haven for (right-wing) "freeze peach" enthusiasts to say hateful things primarily against minority groups. This is categorically false. I'm not sure Mr. Freeman appreciates why people might believe this angle, or he might make it even more clear in QOTO's About page how heavily moderated QOTO is. Then again, he has stated so many times in comments when it has come up, although they are comments I'm not sure most relevant people can actually see, since they come from someone at the now-blocked QOTO!

## Consequences

I'm a mastodon evangelist in my circle of friends, and I convinced my board gaming friend to move to dice.camp, away from tabletop.social. I convinced my artist friend to sign up with sunny.garden rather than mastodon.art. A long-time mastodon-savvy friend reached out to warn me about a push toward defederating from QOTO, suggesting that I might "wind up on a fediverse island soon if this defederation continues," and I guess that's a chance I'm taking. (I sent him the first URL in this post.) It seems strange that the sixth-most-connected server could end up as an "island" with zero evidence of any actually-offensive posts.

The thread that prompted that friend to reach out was illustrative. The initial post said that they were blocking QOTO based on a message from a QOTO admin that no, QOTO wouldn't block a server for inciting genocide. But the response wasn't quoted, it was just "Admin replied that Qoto would not block such servers." It possible that the response was actually that QOTO does not block *any* servers, which is a principled stand, but it is described in a way that suggests Qoto is in favor of genocide, or at least tolerant of advocating for it. It was nice to see that other people spoke up in comments suggesting that this sounded a bit like a witch hunt, and that it should perhaps require "documented evidence of continuous abuse of rules" rather than blocking based on a singe possibly-misunderstood conversation.

But that's federation! Every server owner gets to decide for themself what they want to allow, and if that means cutting off huge swathes of servers until eventually it's just a few servers in an echo chamber patting each other on the back over their policies, that's their choice. We can have a tiny cluster of defederated right-wing authoritarians over here, and a tiny cluster of defederated left-wing authoritarians over there, and never the twain shall meet.

I've seen a couple of mentions of "The Paradox of Tolerance" in discussions about QOTO, but I don't think what we're seeing is over-dependence on tolerance on QOTO's part resulting in nastiness spreading around mastodon. Instead, we're seeing intolerance in the extreme, with a few individuals cutting off all possible reasonable discussion for large groups of users, many of whom have no idea what's happening, all without any actual evidence of bad behavior or reprehensible views on the part of QOTO users. A small group of authoritarian left-wingers have decided that QOTO is right-wing and acted precipitously to cut it off before anyone manages to say anything right-wing. As someone actually using QOTO, this comes as a surprise to me. None of the admins have said anything I've noticed as being specifically right-wing, and have been very vocal in support of the LGBT community, for example, which is not a stance I tend to associate with right-wing trolls. I don't post much about politics, but I'm pretty far from a right-winger myself. I'm also pretty far from authoritarian, though, so I guess I'm not cut out to be a mastodon admin.

#blog #nerdery #mastodon #politics

I have never received something like this. We are experiencing a rise in hate, while many look the other way or seek to profit from it. I refuse to allow this to be the norm and a part of my child’s future. I will fight against hate and extremism and for decency and acceptance.

Molly White bravely presented her talk, [Is Web3 bullshit?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGsllEF7w_g), at Web Summit 2022 in front of a crowd with what are likely many people deeply invested in Web3. She calls out the ubiquity of vaporware, the numerous grifts, and the entrenchment power behind the rhetoric while acknowledging the importance of the lofty goals which should inspire technologists.

#Skepticism, #Technology, #Video, #Web3

It’s #FollowFriday so I hope folks utilize the hashtag to find my account here!
Give me a boost! Maybe if I can show some of the big accounts on Twitter that it’s possible to grow sizably and quickly here, too, they’ll migrate over!

Over on Twitter it’s like the Penguin is in charge of Gotham.

My #oped on Elon #Musk, #twitter and the myth of the lone #tech genius ran in the #globeandmail today:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-elon-musk-could-be-our-catalyst-to-dispense-with-the-myth-of-the-lone/

Hope you enjoy.

*I am reposting Freemo's (@freemo on 🐘 & @DocFreemo on 🐦 ) long blog post (https://jeffreyfreeman.me/eugen-rochko-ceo-of-mastodon-found-to-support-nazis-agenda), not in support or opposition but because I wanted to place it on #Mastodon and #Twitter for a convenient read, and a place for others to comment publicly.*

*It's long, and new information for me, so I am still processing it.*

---
`

# Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, Caves to Nazi's Agenda

I know, clickbait title right? Sadly no. When we say Nazi here we dont just mean your garden variety racist, as bad as that is, but your swastika wielding, genocide wanting, literal Nazi. But lets take a step back for a moment and start from the beginning. Its been a long road with many twists and turns, its a very damning accusation, and its important we lay out all the details, show the proof, and give you all the information for you to decide for yourself.

I am the founder of one of the oldest instances (servers) on the Mastodon network, QOTO. It is almost 5 years old and we have been building this network along side Eugen Rochko since the beginning. There has been a fair bit of drama and while Eugen Rochko has been more or less consistent in stamping out hate speech and prejudice this seems to be limited to when its popular rather than when its right. But this isn't the story of Eugen, in many ways its the story of QOTO and the impact Eugen has played in the network and towards our little corner of it.

## The beginning, the exodus

QOTO was founded in July of 2018 out of a need to create a STEM oriented instance that respected and protected the safety of its userbase, in particular that of the LGBTQ+ community. At its founding the network was much simpler than it was today, only a handful of instances and moderation was simplistic.

QOTO only had a dozen or so users at the time and one morning in July of 2019 when I woke up I noticed we were getting hundreds of new users a day. I had no idea what had changed, excited I started asking around to see why we were so popular. As it turns out there was a fracturing throughout the network underway and QOTO was slowly becoming a focal point. To my shock it turned out that GAB, a social media network filled with hatred, racism, sexism, and all forms of prejudice, had decided to enter the Mastodon network. When this happened instance owners around the network took a hardline approach that divided the network down the middle. On one side instance owners decided to start forcing its users to not be able to see Gab content and blocked them from even seeing instances that did not likewise follow suit, users couldn't follow anyone, even from well behaved instances, if those users were allowed to see Gab at all. On the other side many servers allowed the content unrestricted. To further compound the issue the instances that allowed the content generally had little to no moderation policies themselves, so hate speech ran rampant on those servers. Meanwhile the servers that did block the content tended to be very draconian and were blocking users for very trivial reasons and “dog whistles” and it became a witch hunt. The reason QOTO became a focal point at this time is because we were one of the only servers that allowed our users to choose what content they wanted to block, and made our block list optional, but at the same time had a zero tolerance stance for hate speech and prejudice. It became a haven for the LGBTQ+ community that wanted the freedom to choose for themselves what instances make the cut or not.

I think it’s important I back up as much as I can with the evidence here, therefore, you can view our strong protections for the LGBTQ+ in QOTO’s Terms of Service here: https://qoto.org/about/more. Below are some excerpts from that link. For the sake of transparency it is important for me to point out in the early days when we were smaller these protections weren’t as clearly stated and were added as we grew and the issue needed to be more clearly addressed; however, we have always had a strong emphasis on engaging in respectful discourse and have had a heavy hand when it comes to banning those who engaged in hate speech.

> All cultures welcome

> Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.

> hate-based speech such as sexist, racist, or homophobic speech will not be tolerated, be kind to each other.

> QOTO aims to provide a community where our users do not fear being punished for their personal opinions. We do not allow people to disseminate ideologies that are abusive or violent towards others. Demonstrating support for or defending ideologies known to be violent or hateful is a bannable offense. This includes, but is not limited to: racial supremacy, anti-LGBTQ or anti-cis-gender/anti-straight, pro-genocide, child abuse or child pornography, etc. While we recognize questions and conversation regarding these topics are essential for a STEM community, in general, doing so in bad faith will result in immediate expulsion.

> What will get you banned: … Hate-based racism, sexism, and other hateful speech…

As our numbers quickly grew into the thousands the issue of what to do about Gab and our stance on censorship came under scrutiny. We had to decide officially where we stand and what rules we wanted to make. Since our community at the time was largely made up of the very victims affected by everything going on we felt it best to hold a private discussion to decide how we could best protect the interests of our LGBTQ+ community. We had weeks of discussion and debate around the issue, but there was a strong consensus in the end. You see, there were some very bad actors on the Gab network, people like Milo Yiannopoulos, who had a habit of doxxing and making calls to violence against people in the trans community. Him and people like him were at the center of the debate. As it turns out the overwhelming majority of the LGBTQ+ that had migrated to our server did so because it was one of the few places left they could monitor these bad-actor accounts. They would keep a close eye for attempts at doxxing or calls to violence and then quickly disseminate that to their communities and warn the parties at risk. This was critical for ensuring the safety of the lives of many in our community. We still weren’t sure what to do so we discussed alternative ways to monitor these accounts, each of which were shot down for various reasons. I will summarize some of the alternatives we considered and why the community ultimately rejected it below.

**Open an account on Gab for monitoring** - This was immediately rejected as it would expose the victims emails, ip addresses, and usage patterns to the admins of Gab who were not trusted.

**Use RSS feeds** - This wouldn’t give access to follower-only posts and were not always enabled on many accounts

**Use a VPN** - VPNs only work when you remember to use it. If a user forgot, even once, to turn on their VPN then their IP would get exposed, a risk they weren’t willing to take.

Needless to say we didn’t have any good solutions that were in the best interest of our community. In the end we made a very controversial decision. We decided to let people have access to view these accounts but with very strict policies against anyone who would show any support for the hateful content. If anyone was shown to encourage or support the hate coming from these sites they would be immediately met with a ban and we encouraged all new users to import a block list that would block these servers outright, at their discretion.

Unfortunately this caused a lot of backlash. Many instance admins were bitter over losing such a huge chunk of their user base to us, particularly when they perceived their own actions as justice rather than oppressive. Many of the instance admins started misinformation and hate campaigns against QOTO and there was a lot of backlash and QOTO even got on a few block lists as a result. But since the safety of the lives of our LGBTQ+ community were a point we refused to compromise on our stance remained absolute.

Later we even took it one step further. You see in Mastodon when you follow an account this alerts the account that you are following them. This was a big concern since it might expose our LGBTQ+ members who were monitoring accounts and fear for their privacy was at stake. As a result we implemented a unique feature only present at QOTO called subscriptions. It effectively allowed our users to follow an account without alerting the account they were being followed. It was privacy-respecting, however, specifically designed so it only allowed you to see posts a user made as a public post. Any posts that were restricted to follower-only or private could not be seen with a subscribe, you still needed to do a follow for that. Despite the privacy-respecting aspect of the feature the hate and disinformation campaign against QOTO continued by a handful of bitter instance admins. They lied and made announcements about our feature as privacy-violating and claimed, erroneously, that it bypassed security and let users view follower-only content, which of course it didn’t. The divide grew even larger, and as it did our following grew even larger too.

## Acceptance on the joinmastodon directory

Despite the divide across the network we still have a huge LGBTQ+ community and a large following in the thousands by this point. We therefore applied to join the joinmastodon.org directory, the official directory of Mastodon maintained by Eugen himself. The criteria for getting on this directory are listed clearly and since we qualified, and because of the applause of our supporters, we eventually made it to the list.

As a specialty instance that caters specifically to the STEM community this was a crucial milestone for us. It increased our influx of new users substantially and allowed us to reach a level of healthy growth. Due to our popularity Eugen generally defended the attacks against us from instance admins still bitter of the earlier exodus. This was looking good for QOTO and the fediverse.

## Enter snow, the Nazi

By this point in the story QOTO had grown to tens of thousands in size and was in fact one of the largest specialty instances in the entire network. Aside from a handful of bitter instance owners our reputation was excellent and we were highly recommended by our peers. We were consistently seeing hundreds of new users a day and we were growing steadily.

In stepped a new user, a software engineer who went by the moniker Snow. At first he seemed unsuspecting and we had no reason to worry about him, but things quickly went downhill. Snow started posting content largely targeted at transgendered individuals criticising the choice to be trans as unhealthy. He quickly was met with opposition from our community and shortly after his hate speech began he found himself blocked from our community. He tried opening alt accounts and to protest the ban but we weren’t having any of it, he wasn’t welcome back.

Shortly after Snow was booted he tried to join a few other communities to use as a platform to discredit QOTO, some of which were somewhat accepting of hate speech but ultimately he was banned from all of them. Furious and determined Snow started his own instance called wintermute, his profile littered with actual swastikas and Nazi insignia, he called for genocide against trans people and other horrific acts. Sadly he even managed to gain a following at his server of similar minded Nazis.

Snow ultimately used this to his advantage and began coordinating an attack on QOTO whose effects linger to this day. He publicly posted from his main account a call to arms for his followers to flood fake accounts on QOTO and the fediverse at large. Their tactic was to post hate speech on QOTO, then immediately report it across several of the progressive instances around the fediverse in an attempt to make us seem like a pro-nazi forum. While the original post is no longer online as the server has since been taken down you can see a screenshot of this and a related post below.

*See images 1 & 2*

Of course QOTO quickly deleted and suspended any accounts posting such content. But because their alts reported it immediately those reports still showed up on hundreds of other servers coming to the attention of their admins. Not only did he coordinate this attack by reporting the content across many servers around the fediverse but he also reported it to several block lists for further visibility. Below is a screenshot of him attempting to report it to the Fediblock block list. The link in the below screenshots originally went to the posts I showed above. Luckily he didn’t manage to succeed with Fediblock but he did manage to get us on quite a few block lists as a result.

*See image 3*

Needless to say the previously small number of instance admins that still had an issue with QOTO used this as fuel for the fire. They spread the news of the reports in an attempt to defame QOTO and because the reports were so widespread it worked. QOTO quickly started showing up on numerous block lists around the fediverse. Needless to say it is hard to fight against a misinformation campaign, lies spread faster than truth.

## Picking up the pieces

As the admin of QOTO I was left trying to figure out some way to counter the disinformation that had spread. Like most disinformation campaigns it took on a life of its own. People saw the lies, bought them, and their gut reaction was to hate us without ever bothering to check the facts. Once someone hates you it is very hard to reason with them, the lies compound, gossip ripples, and soon everyone swears they have a cousin who was the victim of an attack. Of course anyone who spent even a moment looking through QOTOs timeline would see we are a place where acceptance and concern for the LGBTQ+ community remains our top priority. We retained a loyal band of supporters, but our enemies were growing no matter how much goodwill we tried to spread.

In an attempt to remedy the situation I decided to reach out to key members in the community and explain the situation. I found a seemingly innocuous website on the internet that listed all the instances that blocked QOTO. I went down the list and started reading the about pages looking to see what administrators had contact information and welcomed people reaching out to them. Of the servers that blocked us about 20% of them explicitly had contact information and welcomed others reaching out about administrative matters. So I started emailing them one by one and tried my best to politely and respectfully explain what had happened in the hopes we could reconcile.

Unfortunately this backfired, many of these administrators had made up their mind before ever hearing our side of it. They used my friendly efforts to reach out and mend things as an attack, going so far as to call it harassment simply for contacting them at all. To add insult to injury it just so happened that the tool used to generate the list that ultimately made its way to the website was written by a member of KiwiFarms, a vile and hateful community. The website itself didn’t have any indication of this in the domain name and at the time I was unaware of this fact. Nonetheless this information was used to further defame us, as if we are somehow responsible for the tool a website author happened to use. Regardless of this a new campaign of misinformation and lies spread to try to attack us for emailing them and now the claim is centered around harassment.

For the sake of openness and providing all the evidence the full content of the letter I sent to the administrators mentioned above is included below:

> Hi, I noticed you had QOTO blocked, I figured this might be a mistake as there has, for some time, been attempts to lie about our policies by some users we blocked for hate speech and sadly some of the community followed along.

> Snow, some years back, was blocked for hate speech and he began a campaign against us spoofing various users claiming we accept hate speech on our instance and other outright lies. At one point he even attempted to create accounts on QOTO that posted hate speech and despite getting suspended shortly after, by doing so in the middle of the night, some of it was noticed for the short time it was up.

> My guess is some of this misinformation made its way to you and you, understandably, may have blocked our instance.

> We also had some similar trouble many years ago where the LGBTQ community was being attacked and they fled, en masse to our server (which is how our server became so popular early on). This caused several people to attack us in a similar manner spreading quite a few lies as well.

> For more information detailing that incident please see this post, it also explains our subscribe feature, which is privacy-respecting and provides the same level of access as using an RSS reader to follow an account: https://qoto.org/@freemo/109319817943835261

> I urge you to actually review our timeline and see for yourself, hate speech, harassment, misinformation, etc has never been tolerated in our instance and still is not.

> To recap some of the misinformation:

> 1) We have very strict and aggressively enforced policies against hate speech in all forms, you wont find any on our timeline and if you do and report it you will find it is usually acted on with a suspension very quickly.

> 2) Our subscribe feature is privacy respecting and was specifically implemented to protect the physical safety of our LGBTQ community during their mass exodus to QOTO in the early years. Similarly, for their protection and at their request, is why we only silence servers and do not suspend them (see the post I linked above for the details on this).

> 3) harassment and other issues are also strictly enforced on our server.

> If you wish to discuss this further please feel free to reach out to me either by email or by reaching out to me at @freemo

## Eugen caves to Nazi’s campaign

This leads us to Eugen Rochko’s role in all this. Up until this point while QOTO was still popular with the majority of the instances he had defended his position to keep us on the joinmastodon official directory of instances. However with the misinformation spread by Snow and the hate this ultimately generated directly and indirectly from this incident he decided to delist us from the official directory over at joinmastodon.org. He did this knowing full well what happened with Snow, he knew Snow’s efforts were to get us suspended, delisted, and blocked and knowing this was all the agenda of a Nazi and his cohorts he still decided to cave to popular pressure rather than to do what was right and set the record straight and stand by the LGBTQ+ communities safety above popularity. This is a shameful and outright disgusting act on his part. I believe it is fueled largely by the increased visibility Mastodon has had lately as people are migrating *en masse* from twitter to the network. He cared more about appearances than the actual safety of the lives of the LGBTQ+ community and this is disheartening to say the least.

I had reached out to Eugen and explained the situation in detail. There has also been a huge outpouring of people on both Twitter and Mastodon trying to contact him and get him to see reason. Other than a short email response he has completely refused to even engage in the conversation at all.

There are several concerning consequences of this decision, particularly the silence that accompanies it.

1. It sends the message that as long as a Nazi or other bad actor can generate enough support his demands will be appeased.

2. It lends credibility to the Nazi’s claims, giving the impression to others QOTO was delisted because the claims against it were true.

3. It significantly reduces our influx of new users. As a specialty instance it is not easy to find new users as it would b e for a generalist instance.

4. It no longer shows up when trying to connect using the official mastodon app which relies on that list as part of its search. This causes people to have a hard time connecting even if they are already here.

He was aware of the incident with the group of Nazis, he knew their agenda, and in the end he supported the Nazi’s agenda to get us banned and delisted because it was the popular thing to do. Nothing more, nothing less. In his own words in the one reply he managed to muster about this incident “I will take a listing down if it risks endangering the reputation of Mastodon”. A man who cares more about Mastodon’s “reputation” than he does about the physical safety of the LGBTQ+ community has no business being in charge.

---

Great read!

"Today, it’s getting harder to believe that these networks will last forever. In the blink of an eye, they’ve gone from unassailable eternal mountains to shifting sands that might blow away at at time. Users are scrambling to download their data and tell their friends where they can be found if (when?) the service disappears.

How did these systems go from permanent to ephemeral? How did it happen so quickly..."
https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
#socialmedia #twitter #facebook #myspace #bebo

#Twitter: "Gonna be pwning n00bz on my Twitch channel in 20 minutes! Follow or die!"

#Mastodon: "I am a nuclear biologist, gardener, writer, and developer. I recently rewrote the code to the entire web, baked a lovely shepherd's pie, forged a Damascus steel sword for my wife, and wrote an entire book of prayers in Old English for my children."

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109383947978442853

@Gargron What about addressing the situation with the silent delisting of qoto.org without warning, discussion, or reason, despite the organization meeting the charter agreement?

It’s good to see engagement and use growing here. It would be healthy to have a social platform free of the billionaire oligopoly and the corporate ad folks, don’t you think?

The rise of Christian Nationalist extremism and the rise of politically driven violence is not a coincidence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUiAujodNoU

I don’t understand why people think Mastodon is difficult. It seems pretty straightforward, and the separate servers are no biggie. I’m enjoying this fresh start here, like moving to a new apartment!

So I've written this short piece based on my first few days here. I'm really keen on helpful suggestions as I think there will be a need to share them with people as they join Mastodon, so please if you have time share them with me here.
#socmed #mastodon #twitter

https://www.applemust.com/how-to-think-about-mastodon-as-you-retreat-from-twitter/

Hi Mastodon friends. Still trying to get the hang of this, but wanted to share Civil Discourse (my newsletter on Substack) from tonight, which is timely for our migration from Twitter & for the midterms. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/too-sensitive?sd=pf

Some advise for new peeps on Mastodon:

The people you're following would generally *love* to follow you back IF you:
* Post an #Introduction toot and pin it
* Fill out your profile's bio
* Put in a profile picture

Whenever I get a follow request and there's no profile pic, no bio, no intro, and no toots posted yet in general, I don't follow back, because I don't know anything about that person. It's like being introduced to a person wearing a bag over their head. ;)

#Boost please :D