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.
I spent way more time than was warranted digging into this completely petty drama.
Eris seems to have been widely blocked and defederated for using the word ‘based’ and for thinking ubuntu.buzz was about linux. I’m not sure what kind of perspective makes that a priority, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be one based in compassion or world experience. Half the people I’ve met who use the word ‘based’ have nothing to do with 4chan, they’re just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don’t think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.
Defederation is an important feature, and people should be able to defederate from whoever they want. What isn’t okay, though, is people going out of their way to propagate pettiness as much as humanly possible. Eris seems a little rough around the edges, but I also get the impression that the folks interacting with her in all the overly dramatic nonsense I just read are not acting in remotely good faith. They resemble a twitter mob looking for somebody to hate on, taking zero interest in understanding or nuance. No thanks.
I thought the whole based/cringe thing was just zoomer slang?
Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.
Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don’t know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.
I’m pretty sure it started with Lil B “Thank You Based God”.
Lil B was an underground rapper with… varying levels of quality (at least at the time). His thing was calling himself “Based God” as people were calling him “based” as a negative (presumably to mean he was dumb), but thanks to his music and understanding internet culture and turning it in his favour, he managed to turn “based” from something that was negative to a positive.
Then 4chan got ahold of it for Donald Trump’s election and that word has never recovered.
Go figure. 4chan was pretty based 10 years ago.
4chan was never based.
Also probably important to note that even being connected to 4chan isn’t always a bad thing. The web (particularly youtubers) have made 4chan as a whole to be some boogeyman website full of hackers and nazis, but it’s a loosely connected web of forums (known as boards), many of which don’t have anything to do with another apart from being anonymous. It’s kind of like lemmy in that regard. I’ve browsed it in my time, and while it is definitely quite a toxic site, most if not all the toxicity originates from a select dozen-or-so boards, and only 3 or 4 of them are even popular (b, pol, r9k, x). Hell, if you go right now to /a/, you’ll probably just see a bunch of weebs discussing anime like any other forum.
note: this isn’t to say 4chan is safe like beehaw. The whole culture of the site is very archaic and a lot of people on there are still there saying slurs and being generally offensive, but when you stay away from hellholes like /b/ or /pol/, I’ve seen worse on reddit.
If some stranger on the street told me they used 4chan, without specifying what board, I mean I might be suspicious of which boards they’re using (depending on context clues) but it’s not a buzzword that translates to “white supremacist”
I agree. Not all these forums are about the same content nor do they all involve the nazi stuff.
/vp/ used to be really good at good Pokemon info back in the Black/White days.
That said - I haven’t been back in quite a while, but even back then you did occasionally see folks who obviously were from /b/ or /pol/ posting. I’m sure it’s probably gotten worse over the years, as people start growing out of 4chan…
I almost thought I had written your comment and completely forgot about it. No, I just almost made the exact comment and want that hour of my life back.
If there was some over the top racist rant, I sure didn’t see it. And the admin pushing for the defederation sounds so bizarre. Bizarre is the best word I could come up with because “petty” makes me think it was like high school politics. This is closer to a grade school sandbox argument.
The worst I saw was “defedremoveds” and it was used in a way that was meant to highlight how they never said anything offensive. Like saying, “If you thought what I said before was offensive, let’s see how you respond to something intended to be negative.”
The crazy thing is that the decision is being made because the admin just liked a post. It’s not even because of the post content - which has nothing controversial and appeared maybe 8 times in my Lemmy/kbin feed yesterday.
Editing to add that this is the article: https://kbin.social/search?q=wakeup+call
I don’t even see who posted an article in my feed unless I open up three post and look for it. I upvotes things all the time without knowing who posted them. I’m all about aggressively defending safe places and I don’t think they were out of line to defed, but I agree that this whole thing seems awfully overblown from what I’ve seen. The users deserve an explanation of the defed and why and the story should’ve ended there.
Generally, if someone’s being a total asshole so severely that they have to be yeeted with several thousand other unaware bystanders, I expect to see a bunch of examples within the first… 2, maybe 3, links.
If someone can point me to a concise list of examples (actual data), I find it more disturbing that an admin on another server can yeet my account because they make noise on a discord server.I mean, yes, federating is a feature, but why even offer the ability to enroll users? Maybe for a group of friends, or something, but just rando users is nothing but a liability to everyone involved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned is that ubuntubuzz.com is about the Linux distro, and it’s the first hit for “Ubuntu buzz”. I’d definitely interpret ubuntu.buzz to be about Linux, at least if I didn’t check the about page.