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.
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.
To be fair…
There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)
I don’t like the Lemmy maintainers, and that was a big jump propelling me onto Kbin. It just made me feel squicky knowing that I was tacitly endorsing their software by using it when there was an alternative available that did exactly the same things. I also don’t like using communities on Lemmy.ml because the admins there have a history of removing stuff that doesn’t suit their political views.
I don’t think these two situations are equivalent, mind, but I do think there is more weight behind “avoid using Lemmy” than “avoid using Calckey/Firefish”.
Kbin started as a Lemmy fork called “karab.in” (carbine in Polish). Not sure about the story behind that, but I didn’t like the sound of it. Now Kbin has been reimplemented in PHP, which is arguably a much worse choice for server software than Rust. Those two kept me away from it.
But the kicker is: right now, we’re discussing this in a community hosted by Beehaw, which is running Lemmy, even if you can interact with it from your instance which is running Kbin.
So as for endorsing one or another:
Using any of these without giving back, is not “endorsing” it, it’s mooching off of it! So if you dislike Lemmy more… why not mooch off of that one? 😛
I think the case with Calckey is equivalent: whatever their ideology, as long as their work is OpenSource, just take it and use it for your own purpose. It does seem to be much weaker, though.
BTW Lemmy.ml is a very weakly political instance, focused more on Lemmy development. The “tankie” one is Lemmygrad, which most sane instances have defederated from… except Lemmy.ml itself, but just stick to “subscribed” or “local” and you’ll be fine.
I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.
I can relate to that. It usually isn’t a coin flip for me though. I’ll align with some technology over another because I truly can see an advantage. That technology might be the underdog from the beginning. Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin whereas all of them combined are the underdog for certain more well established social forums. I engage with all three (and others still), because I don’t know the future.
There’s a third one I didn’t know about?
That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.
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.
That’s the same theme of a reply I made yesterday. I read the article and might have even boosted it myself because as a fediverse citizen, I’m concerned about any government agency seizing an instance like this. The “well known racist” claim is demonstrably false, because I still don’t know who they are talking about nor would I know the person behind a username.
The article wasn’t the problem, it’s more of a “A boosted B’s link and C thinks B is a racist, so C defederated their instance from A’s.”
C seems… oversensitive and fragile, but I just tweeted (Xeeted?) that I want to watch Mitch McConnell’s brain melt on livestream so I’m probably not a good judge of how to properly behave on the internet.
Oh, I understand the tactics being used. I was implying that person c was obviously stalking person a and pounced the moment they did something less than perfect.
My guess is there isn’t anything of substance, so person c’s sensitivity got amplified with time and obsessing over whatever is going on, leading them to overreact. But, not c has to double down if they want any chance of being taken seriously if a significant cause to defederate occurs.
This is, in zoomer speak, based.