Unsurprisingly given its extremely high profile as a purveyor of transphobic coverage, many mastodon instances have greeted them with a firm block. (If this confuses folks who don't pay attention to this sort of thing, just picture in your head if it was fox news.)

I posted a medium-short summary elsewhere with a couple of links for folks looking for slightly more context.

I don't think the eris or defederation things are Huge News in themselves, but if it's true he doctored a screenshot to make the .art admin look bad, that's not a good look for a lead deve/flagship instance admin.

.art is an influential leader in community safety/moderation standards in the fediverse; their standards for federation are moderately high, and probably higher than folks on many lemmy instances would likely agree with. But it feels like the firefish guy has possibly a pattern of not doing his homework about things in general?

Obviously the big question is, did he actually doctor screenshots and if so, WTF, man.

https://mas.else.social/@choyer/110746384528095273

Someone checked and there's already an existing trademark for Firefish in software specifically, at least in Europe. Apparently they make HR solutions of some sort.

https://jobs.firefishsoftware.com/about-us/meet-the-team.aspx

Firefox, but make it wet

(I don't know if it's a worse than "calckey" tbf)

They just put out a lot of mediocre products, mostly. Also they were hilariously rude to the creator of the MT3 profile (which is one of their signature accomplishments in the keyboard space)

We need the Lemmy equivalent of fediblock so we can post this for everyone to defederate

It's going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who's running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.

Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.

No disrespect to the blahaj admins at all (I'm on lemmy.blahaj.zone rigth now!) but safe spaces for queer folks aren't automatically safe spaces for non-white folks and there's a lot of historical pain and drama about that on the fediverse

There are many different visions for "success" of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of "growth."

I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[^1].

To achieve this, it's beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.

But to sustain it, it's necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It's also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.

These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of "successful" (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you're on one of the large instances.

Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.

There's not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[^2] and not just the users, plus there's not yet a way to migrate communities.

[^1]: in the sense of social connections generally, not just "community" as a lemmy feature [^2]: In the lemmy feature sense

I don't know that a formal charter is required, but I do think that it is important that all instance admins do a couple of things:

• Develop and publish a moderation policy in some form
• Determine and publish criteria by which they decide when to defederate from another instance

There isn't one right answer for either of those things, and the point isn't to ensure everybody passes a purity test. It's to set expectations for users on the instance, users on other instances who may participate in communities on the instance, and other instance admins.

Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.

It will also be helpful for the community to be able to talk about things like what instances have a lot of bad actors or poor moderation, something similar to #fediblock on Mastodon. The issues that mods face and that individuals targeted for harassment face are often invisible to the average joe user, and can also be invisible to admins if they aren't actively encountering reports themselves. #fediblock creates a place -- sometimes fractious, yes -- where folks can ensure that those issues are visible and give admins an opportunity to determine whether or not they need to take action.

Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.

The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, ~~join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you.~~ defederate

The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don't have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.