We, the moderation and administration of tech.lgbt, are signing the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact in fellowship with our peer communities. (https://vantaa.black/pact)
There is over a decade of precedent that Facebook will not have users' best interests as their guiding principle but rather profit margins, if it joins the Fediverse.
We at tech.lgbt have long held the belief that corporation owned instances are a threat to the core of the Fediverse: freedom for users to be themselves and to be a part of their communities. The 2010s saw the loss of online freedom when the majority of the Web was consolidated into a few destinations, and Facebook entering here could lead us back to centralization. Furthermore, NDAs for server admins will constrain our sovereignty online by binding us legally from disrupting their business.
We are not products. We are people, and we do not welcome Facebook in this space.
Hello #fediblockmeta, many people are discussing #thebadspace#blocklist after they blocked tech.lgbt, but few people went through all 355 pages to look at it the #badspace contents. I did that and want to share my findings.
I don't want attention or followers, but I want this post shared, so I am posting from an alt.
Currently sleeping the sleep of the righteous, @andrew was up way too late building tools to fend off the current wave of fedi spam, playing whack-a-mole with bad accounts, and getting fedi friends up and running with their own blocklists.
I’d like to convene a discussion this week or next to do a mini retro on this attack and some #designthinking work around fedi spam fighting tools. If you’re interested in the discussion, @ me your email or send one to spamretro at hypatia dot ca and I’ll loop you in on it 🙏
Would love to have a proper UR/UX person on the call, I’m a mere amateur at that part 😅
Still going through and sending out invites for a retro/postmortem call regarding this weekend's spam attack, but in the interim I also made an asynchronous retro form: https://forms.gle/V4h9zBE6pcTvpQAx8
Also useful if you hate video calls, have a conflict on your calendar, or otherwise prefer writing. Thanks for sharing and/or replying!
someone on a Japanese hacker forum decided it was a good idea to spam the entire Fediverse because they wanted to cancel a minor that DDoSed a Discord bot which apparently made them lost millions (what?)
A Discord bot. I can't make this shit up man.
The real culprit seems to be someone who goes by mumei in the ctkpaarr.org forums, whose first post was literally a threat to ap12, that if they don't delete their "Kuroneko Server" Discord bot, they will spam every blog, forum and SNS and cancel him.
This shit is ridiculous.
The ap12 account from mastodon-japan was actually fake, and this dude impersonated a minor to get all of the Fediverse (us) to bully him.
#FediblockMeta
Most SM platforms lack capacity to handle reports that refer to anti-Indigenous abuse or behaviour. So, some tips for #FediAdmin and mods when receiving reports about racism and harassment targeted at #Indigenous people - from an Indigenous mod from so-called Australia with both lived and professional experience:
In addition to universal slurs & offensive terms used against Indigenous people, there's also geographical terms. If in doubt, ask for advice.
Non-Indigenous people questioning an Indigenous person's identity, culture, connections, lived experiences etc is racist. It doesn't matter if there was "good intent".
The above behaviour is often gaslighting or DARVO. It's a tactic used to silence Indigenous people, and discredit them.
Non-Indigenous people using blood quantum or light skin appearance to silence, question or harass an Indigenous person is highly racist. And is another tactic anti-Indigenous racists use.
[In so-called Australia, non-Indigenous people weaponising/discussing BQ and appearance of Indigenous people is highly offensive, as it was an eugenic tool used to excuse genocide]
Racism against Indigenous people, especially from centralists or leftists, is often masked by paternalism, sealioning, race-based micro-aggressions, and whitesplaining.
6 Things bystanders/racist apologists do that make it worse - a) offering support to the abusers. b) replying to Indigenous people who are being racially attacked with comments such as: "I didn't see any racism" "You're the racist" "Get help for your trauma" "They're always nice to me" "They're an ally, so be nicer to them".
Indigenous peoples are not an homogeneous group. So you can't always apply local information you know to reports. If in doubt, reach out to someone from that region with experience.
Outspoken Indigenous people, or those with a public profile (ie journalists, authors, actors, politicians, activists, academics, large followings), are commonly racially abused on social media platforms. Believe us when we make reports or speak up, as we are familiar with all the tactics racists use.
There are very few Indigenous mods on Mastodon, and even less Indigenous mods. But we all want to see anti-Indigenous abuse and behaviour addressed. If in doubt, reach out to us.
Please don't hesitate to take action when anti-Indigenous racism & behaviour is reported. Let's not duplicate the problems of other social media platforms. Be #AntiRacist - always
If your instance admin is speaking favorably about #facebook joining the #fediverse, get out now before they start feeding your data to the company partly responsible for overturning several elections (by violating data privacy laws with impunity). The company that demonstrates a clear conservative bias with every act.
Looking for a safer instance? Try this list of spaces with admins of integrity.
This instance handles, on average, 6.5 reports of antisemitism a day.
Why is that significant? It's significant because Babka already suspends individual accounts, and Limits entire instances.
Despite this, we deal with ~6.5 new antisemitic accounts per day.
And yet, if we look at the graphs from Fediverse Observer, the number of active users on the Fediverse has gone down!
So what exactly does that mean, if the number of antisemitic accounts continues to grow and the number of active users continues to shrink?
It means that the number of antisemites on the Fediverse is quite large, and what we're seeing isn't new antisemites as much as it is antisemitism being so normalized that people feel comfortable spouting hate, and that despite blocking or silencing thousands of accounts, hate continues to be emboldened.
After speaking with my co-admin, I've signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact (https://fedipact.online). Car Free dot City will not federate with any instance operated by Meta/Facebook.
Announcing Free Fediverse, a website resource for all of us fighting to save our communities from absorption into surveillance capitalism!
There are lots of stories, thinkpieces, links and statements flying around and disappearing quickly, and it would be handy to have a place to store and reference them all. Free Fediverse is that place.
Free Fediverse is a wiki-based site linking to resources of the following categories:
Links to and information on the FediPact
Essays on the Meta threat to the Fediverse
Articles on P92 in mainstream media outlets
Announcements from instance admins on joining the pact
Links and information for development projects beyond corporate enclosure
Articles on Meta's many crimes against humanity
Free Fediverse will continue to be updated. Just hit me up to suggest a link for any category. More links to FediPact instance statements are very welcome!
The website has no ads, trackers or analytics. Ferdi the Free Fediverse Froggy sez "hop on over!"
Fediverse friends @alexis and @jo have documented the presence of vile fascist kill-list compiler accounts Moms for Liberty, Libs of Tiktok, Gays Against Groomers and PragerU on Threads. In the attached screenshot, Jo is dogpiled for harassment.
There will be many, many more like them. These accounts won't be banned from Threads, because they produce engagement. And engagement - of any kind, the more negative the better - is all the psychopaths who run Meta care about.
Now we see exactly what we're being pulled into. Facebook hasn't launched a big Mastodon. Instead, the fediverse instances that federate with it will become little Facebooks
After all that drama around #TheBadSpace I just looked through the FediBlock hashtag.
Admins I thought I could trust are blocking people who speak out against fascism on Twitter/X. BiPoC and trans folks are openly beefing and rage-FediBlock-ing each other.
Nobody is impartial.
I don't trust any public blocklist anymore.
And by that logic I can't trust my own public blocklist anymore.
So I shut it down.
So annihilation.social, which seems to be an instance with known issues, is running a bot to identify and post about instances that are blocking #threads.
Other users are then using those posts to send messages to the instance admins asking them to justify their decision (to harass admins of instances that block #Meta, basically).
No, Mark Zuckerberg won't meet you in the lobby Chris Trottier.
Recently one of the fediverse's most ardent proponents of collaboration with Meta produced a long thread in which he details his argument for embracing the P92 gambit with open arms. This post is a response.
If you're wondering why he is not tagged or addressed directly in his thread, that's because Chris is want to block anyone who offers up even the most polite of substantive counterpoints. We'll just toodle along over here thanks. The intent is not actually to debate him, but to provide food for thought to those who might have been persuaded by his relentless advocacy to federate.
Trottier seems to believe that ActivityPub possesses extraordinary powers: "ActivityPub means that whatever of Meta’s userbase that’s exposed to federation will diversify into other platforms […] This diversification reduces the dependence of users on a single platform, giving them more choices and potentially drawing them away from Meta."
But he never acknowledges that Meta platforms comprise an algorithmically-governed censorship regime which repress information of many kinds - for example, the #joinpixelfed hashtag, which was banned on Instagram along with the Pixelfed account itself. Why would this entity allow pied pipers of the fediverse to frolic freely on P92 and evangelize escape from its enclosure?
For that matter, why does he think that would work at all? The userbase of Instagram will be prompted to join Threads. That means something of the existing network effect of that longstanding service will be transplanted in; and rest assured, there will be no account migration functionality provided.
In fact, the number of teen-dream travel-snap influencers who will, upon exposure to a single post by Chris Trottier on the magic of W3C protocol development, leap to wrench themselves away from the highly addictive and even financially-incentivized dependency on their established social graph and plunge themselves into the X11-Wayland religious war waged among the beloved catgirls of the fediverse is statistically very close to zero.
There is also an unsettling absence of agency in Chris's characterization of the lost souls of Meta, as if they're just sheep waiting for the good shepherds of decentralization to lead them to greener pastures. Instagram account holders are free to sign up for a fediverse account right now, and many have already done so - and by the way, the reverse flow is also quite possible for anyone here who wishes to connect to friends and family on Meta networks.
To open this "revelatory" "Pandora's Box" (his words) of the ActivityPub Rapture, Trottier proposes, with great bloviation, something called "lobby servers". As he describes: "Lobby servers can bridge communities. They act as intermediaries that connect different social media platforms, including Meta-owned ones, with non-Meta platforms. […] By federating with Meta, lobby servers can pull content from Meta’s network and redistribute it to other federated platforms. This syndication allows users on non-Meta platforms to access and engage with Meta users’ content, thereby exposing them to different perspectives and encouraging cross-platform interactions…"
The flowery language continues on, but he is not actually proposing some novel new technical development. There is nothing described which is not already part and parcel of ActivityPub federation. The "lobby server" is simply a rebrand of "an instance federating with Meta".
This Hotel California doublespeak is indicative of the most problematic aspects of the communications of pro-Meta luminaries. In a ploy more typical of the contemporary reactionary right, the values and intentions of the opposing fediverse opinions on Meta are inverted. Trottier's post begins: "Federation with Meta actually hurts Meta."
He continues, referencing the FediPact community: "… it’s not everyone’s objective to fight Meta, and there should be spaces where fighting Meta isn’t top of mind. Not everyone wants to be part and parcel of a fight, and that’s okay." So, in this new upside-down reality, the anticapitalists trying to save at least part of the fediverse from colonization by one of the most destructive corporations in the world "don't want to fight Meta"; the true revolutionaries are those eager to collaborate with that corporation.
The Orwellian trolling degenerates from there. He claims that turning away from P92 - a single vertical silo which may comprise tens or even hundreds of millions of users - will paradoxically harm decentralization, because all those little servers federated with each other somehow result in "fragmentation" instead. And the anarchists and marginalized communities in the FediPact? They're actually pro-police authoritarians! "To enforce total defederation will require whitelisting, and policing of that whitelist." The term "whitelist" is repeated over and over in this paragraph, which is a subtle dig in the direction of a general and very nasty propensity among pro-Zuck advocates to associate the FediPact with the "HOA" and the absence of diversity.
On the whole, the most visible proponents for Meta collaboration have been big-instance admins who have done neither themselves or their cause any good over the last couple of weeks. Chris Trottier is something of an exception. We have repeatedly noted people explaining that they were on the fence over the Meta issue, until convinced by Trottier's arguments. He may fancy himself as fighting Meta, but by relentlessly arguing in favor of federating with them, he is actually serving as their most useful and effective asset in the fediverse.
There are times when I think that antisemitism on the Fediverse is going down, but really it's just that our local moderation is going well.
Nonetheless, unless instances' moderators actually take an active stand against it, the result is that it's up to victims of hate speech to be constantly on guard.
I for one am sick of seeing:
Nazi/Holocaust Inversion
Blood Libel Accusations
Harassment of Jews Talking About Antisemitism
Deicide
Word Swapping (ie "Zionists" or "Israelis" used instead of Jews")
Accusations of Weaponized Antisemitism
On the Fediverse.
If you say you're against antisemitism, then take action, clean up your own instance and start taking other instances who allow this kind of hate speech on your instance seriously.
For Sharkey/Misskey users, update to the latest dev for the email domain block feature. Then copy and paste the temporary/disposable email domain list to Blocked Email Domains in Security under Control Panel.
If someone compares Jews to Nazis, the group that killed half the Jews in the world, that is Nazi Inversion, and it's antisemitic. Invoking the Nazis or the Holocaust as so called "rhetorical speech" to talk about the actions of Jews is antisemitic.
It's very clear, it's very simple, and it's not stopping anyone from criticizing anything, because the same argument could be made without Nazi Inversion, and if it couldn't be, then it's not criticism at all, but simply words used to attack, intimidate or in some other way harm Jews.
I'm happy to see that other instances are starting to take Nazi Inversion seriously and act on it when their users engage in hate speech. I strongly encourage all instances who want to stop antisemitism to do the same.
A reminder to the various Fediverse admins that saying you're against antisemitism is good, but if you don't follow up this statement by removing antisemitic content from your instance, it's worse than if you'd said nothing.
Moreover, when Jews offer to help you understand and identify hate speech, but you tell them you know better than they do, and that they can't be trusted to identify their own oppression, you're actively part of the problem.
And if you silence Jews on your instance for talking about antisemitic hate speech, then you're a bad person.
I know I've said this before but it seems the message doesn't get through, and I still see admins puffing themselves up, while ignoring reports or actively oppressing Jews for speaking up.
It seems this happens occasionally on #fedi where malicious users decide to take advantage of instances with poor moderation to spam widely.
There are many solutions, but let me offer a simple change that stops spam dead in its tracks:
#nodebb has a post queue built in. If you have 0 reputation, you need your post to be manually approved. You can adjust this as needed, but even the default (allow regular posting after 1 upvote) is sufficient. Stops 👏spam 👏 cold 👏.
I've come to learn, through multiple examples, that when other Fediverse admins say "We're going to investigate your user's reports of antisemitic harassment." what they really mean is "We don't believe Jews when they say something is antisemitic and we'll come up with reasons why it's not antisemitic, and it's not harassment."
The idea that Jews can't be trusted to decide what is antisemitic is itself problematic, and we experience this and other antisemitic issues with admins that I'm going to say loud and clear that the Fediverse has a very serious systemic antisemitism problem.
When a blocklist that didn't list its perspective on the issue upfront gets involved in an intracommunity dispute
Especially but not exclusively when people outside of a community get involved in intracommunity disputes
There's a fine line to walk on these issues generally—a lot of fine lines, actually, and a lot of nuance that I'm not going to get into right now—but the caution is that blocklists are very easy to weaponize here