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.)

It’s pretty widely known and has been an issue for a long time. It’s not terribly hard to google for.

The question is, if there are instances that are full of transphobic content, and they’re reported, does firefish defederate them. If they do, the view will improve. Although, global feeds are never very useful.

The actual issue is, that as an instance admin who had previously been in the loop for some time with #fediblock and other channels in which admins share this kind of info, folks expected him to already have disqordia blocked.

Also, it seems from his posts elsewhere that he actually was aware and didn’t care. Ample reason to defederate from .art’s perspective. (Firefish.social has subsequently silenced but not blocked disqordia)

All of this is relatively routine, the screenshot fabrication thing more unusual.

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.

The iceshrimp fork actually came before the thing with .art broke and seemingly had to do with issues internal to the calckey development community. It’s hard to say for sure what the situation was because most of the stuff on both sides was pretty vaguely stated.

Lol what does any of that wall of text have to do with “diversity.”

There’s not much drama here tbh; “admin defederates a somewhat controversial instance and some people agree and some people don’t” is, as other commenters have said, very business as usual for the fediverse.

I do think it’s natural in lemmy for people on other instances to have takes about defed calls because they may use communities on one of those two servers, or both, and be impacted as defederation splits the user bases. But it feels like most of the “drama” here is just free speech maximalist/libertarian trolling.

That makes sense! I think you guys are well ahead of the curve in terms of this stuff compared to most instances, it’s appreciated

I don’t have an issue with the defederation call, and transparency regarding decisions around defederation is very healthy and good!

However, one of the more complicated implications of Lemmy’s federated structure is that defederation on instances is more of “everybody’s business” than it is on Mastodon, since Lemmy instances host communities and not just users. I don’t have much sympathy for free speech absolutists who feel the need to frame all defederation as “censorship” or some of form of tyranny, but since it is potentially splitting the user bases of communities on blahaj that folks on other instances have joined, it makes sense for folks on other instances to want their voices to be heard.

(Obviously, there are constructive and non-constructive ways to do that.)

This is also why the answer to everything won’t be “just run your own instance.” It’s important that more instances have well-developed and transparent moderation standards both internally and externally, and users will need to be savvy about the moderation landscape when they choose what instances to start communities on. (This will be a little less loaded of a question if/when Lemmy gets the ability to migrate communities.)

I think there’s a lot of “cross that bridge when we come to it” mindset amongst some of the bigger instance admins that is in the long run is much more detrimental than any one defederation call could be.

I feel like finding a good instance in the fediverse (that’s accepting users) is always a nightmare.

That being said, I’ve been happy with the vibes on lemmy.blahaj.zone and they have a calckey/firefish instance (that’s the main blahaj.zone). But it’s not strictly general-purpose.

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)

…it doesn’t.

Tech also involves corporate $$, “disruptive” (read: anti-worker) innovation, etc. the general skew of tech as an industry seems center-right to me plus lots of tech bros fully engaged (sometimes “ironically”) with the alt right.

At the local level, tech bros form natural partnerships with right wing interests around gentrification and policing.

From an opsec standpoint, certainly. Or they’ll kick in your door like the Kolektiva admin. Definitely best to use end to end encryption if you have any need to protect yourself from state actors. But also fuck meta

I honestly think part of the problem is just how small text for the community name is in the post feed in lemmy.

Also, for some folks who are new to the fediverse, the usage of “Meta” may not be totally obvious.

If they get into the lemmy space, the risk is that we’ll wind up with a bunch of big / important communities hosted on their servers, making it harder down the road to defederate from them. Would be easy for it to snowball into the embrace, extend, exterminate paradigm, in a way much easier than on Mastodon, where nobody can control a hashtag.

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.

I have no desire to see facebook in the fediverse, but that’s not really gentrification, it’s more like Walmart. (Anti-competitive corporate monopoly suppressing competition and forcing everyone to serve their bottom line)

Gentrification refers to the displacement of poor and working class people, and especially people of color, by affluent people, especially white. That’s not the specific dynamic here, in no small part because Mastodon has been self-gentrifying^[1] aggressively from the beginning. (It is jokingly referred to as the HOA of the internet)

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