Trying to follow everything is, as always, tricky without the ability to really search for stuff on Mastodon.
- Calckey, which was a fork of Misskey, rebranded as “Firefish” (for which name choice they have been widely mocked; also there’s already a software company under that name in the UK with a trademark, which could be…interesting)
- This also I think was meant to be the start of a push for more popular adoption of the platform, which has just generally led to a lot of buzz and attention
- Apparently for some days the code was hosted on a far-right git host, which the main developer says they didn’t know at the time; they eventually moved it somewhere else but didn’t openly address the issue until later
- Folks also noticed that the dev was boosting posts by someone with a reputation for being problematic/racist
- .art admin removed the dev from a discord channel where instance admins share safety info, and says that subsequently the dev started circulating a fabricated screenshot regarding this.
Also, that is all coming a couple of days after someone who had previously contributed to calckey forked firefish as iceshrimp (lol) citing being erased from the list of contributors I think and also saying that other folks were leaving that community because of toxicity/safety issues that weren’t really elaborated on in what I saw. I don’t have a link for this because it didn’t happen today and you can’t search for things on Mastodon. My sense at the time was that I had basically no way to evaluate the claims made on either side.
This is all terrible.
If I go on Mastodon am I supposed to check that the author of each toot hasn’t done any crimes somehow before I click the little boost button? How would one actually go about doing that?
If you actually know someone has done or continues to do bad things that ought to get them ejected from the space, are you supposed to respond to that by refusing to interact with them while they are in the space, when they are not doing the bad things, as a sort of poorly coordinated attempt to eject them?
If we have a list of people so terrible that being nice to them means we should exclude you, then why the hell are they still here?
So, the complicated bit about the fediverse is that there’s not one “the space”, there’s thousands of different spaces from which bad actors would need to be ejected. And, of course, not everyone will agree on who constitutes a bad actor, in fact there’s a huge range of different standards applied.
This leads to a situation where you just find out one day that some of your fediverse neighbors/acquaintances are hanging out with the nazi you blocked years ago. The nazi was out of sight out of mind to you because you had already blocked them, but if they’re low-key and mostly post normal stuff, it’s easy for your more casual neighbors not to notice. Not saying the parties involved here are nazis per se, just as a for instance.
The community uses the #fediblock hashtag to raise awareness of bad actors, primarily for the benefit of instance admins so they can update their block lists. There is a communal expectation that admins would be conversant with this.
There are also tools like these to aggregate that information, but currently it’s hard to get much out of them in terms of complete and human-readable context. (They’re primarily designed as tools to support instance admins rather than individual users.)
This whole thing is constantly happening on the fediverse and that part of the story would be completely unremarkable if the firefish dev wasn’t running a flagship instance and developing software.
If, as an instance admin (who we know was even in the discord channel where the admins are discussing this stuff) wasn’t keeping up with fediblock, that’s a red flag for the instance. The fact that he was also (even accidentally) associating with far-right software dev people to host his code is also a red flag, because, why wouldn’t you do some due diligence about that? (This should be a familiar issue to developers in this space, because, alas, there are a lot of nazi/nazi-adjacent people developing software that uses activitypub!)
Anyway, all of that doesn’t necessarily make the firefish dev a bad guy, it just makes him look kind of like inspector fucking clouseau, you know?
If it’s true that he’s also doctoring screenshots to make another instance admin (who is a recognized leader in fediverse community moderation standards) look bad, then that elevates the issue A LOT, especially for someone who is trying to get a lot of folks to adopt his software.
My understanding is this is not happening because of one time thing. What has gotten people upset is the ongoing and repetitive nature of it.
Just boosting a toot will not get you in trouble. It only happens after people have discussed with you multiple times that the person you are boosting is problematic, and you keep decide doing it anyways and keep helping that person evade blocks.
Socially it is no different than if you try to introduce an awful person to your friends. At first they will tell you that they did not like that person and to not bring them around. But if you ignore them and keep doing it anyways, you eventually put them in a position where the only way to avoid the awful person is to avoid you too.