Pixie's Pad

The Bad Space exists because its creator, https://ubiqueros.com/@Are0h / Ro, once set up an instance by and for Black folk after seeing the racism that got a pass on other instances, and then that instance – PlayVicious – got harassed off fedi by racists. Everyone involved in that instance got extreme levels of racist abuse and harassment, and a couple of the other people involved – a mod of PV, Marcia (https://scholar.social/@CaribenxMarciaX), with the help of Ginger (https://kitty.town/@gingerrroot) – started a hashtag, Fediblock, for calling out racism and other shit behaviour so that other instance admins were aware of it, and could block the sources of it, and thus save themselves from being targeted by the same abuse.

A few weeks ago, Oliphant brought on five mods and one co-admin to oliphant.social. I was one of the mods, and we were all of us a diversely intersectional marginalized bunch of people, most of us who have our own established safe space instances, all of us who hang out in Fedimins (the fedi admins Discord group). His intent was to help build oliphant.social into a safe space instance, to have a diverse mod team who could catch the kind of things he'd miss as a white guy, and (this may have been the main factor of Oli bringing on a bunch of mods) to help him moderate the harassment and abuse AnarchoNinaWrites would get from randos in her mentions.

This will be a long post. I'm going to discuss recent fedi 'drama', particularly around Stux/mstdn.social and Byron/Universeodon, to call out the problematic behaviours by white guys that I'm repeatedly exposed to as a demifemme admin (experiencing this behaviour probably applies to anyone who is perceived as 'not male', though), and by the people who perpetuate the behaviour by either agreeing with it, or not calling it out: misogyny, DARVO, gaslighting, and abuser tactics. Content Warning: this post will discuss those tactics, and tangentially mention abusive relationships.

Part 1: Misogyny

To Stux, to Byron, to the privileged white guys who respond to my fediblock posts with threats of litigation, who try to bully and threaten me when I speak up about you, and to everyone who enables you: you're misogynists.

Fields of grey under a washed out, pallid sky.

A flat breeze carrying soporofic piano melodies that crackle on occasion with the degrading connection to the mainframe that seeds out thousands and thousands of connections all playing from speaker to microphone to speaker to microphone to -

A silver sedan with faux leather seats takes you from the pick up point into the city. They put you up in a box of a room, deep in a maze of endless grey towers of uniform height and uniform width and uniform spacing that draw on and on to an insipid horizon. Indoors the air still smells of oil. The carpet, cheap and tacky, is printed with dollar signs. The linen is clean but the threadcount is as low as your expectations.

I'm bitter about the whole Hachyderm thing and I've been sitting on it letting my brain figure out why, so here are some words.

In April 2022 a tech personality spun up a Mastodon instance and her followers flocked to it. She used it to amplify herself across the fediverse, the instance grew to close to 50,000 total members in the course of the following months, during which time she said some Bad Things*, was called on those bad things by the fedi community, had long hard conversations about those bad things, promised to do better, every time with Hachyderm being silenced or defederated from by a few other instances, until recently when it happened again and a few more instances went 'okay this doesn't sit right with us so we're going to silence or we're going to defed' – at which point she threw her arms up in the air, had herself a little livestream exit party on Twitch, and ditched.

It was several days later when the trader Nofis Lovt and his escort, the serpentine Deacon Kaiss, returned to the Missionary camp. The hand-wagon that had been tightly packed with little more than frippery when the pair had left was now stocked with equally meretricious junk from the Nyis villagers. Still, Bishop Voris had to show something for his endeavours, and some vainglorious idiot somewhere would pay well to have one of the native’s pieces of pottery on display in their opulent quarters where they could boast about how remarkable it all was that the backwards mud-dwellers could produce art.

Like a sheet of polished silver the Siashim lake stretched out from the shore to the mountains in the distance. It was a quiet morning with no trace of wind to lick the water into gentle waves and the surface stood still and glossy, reflecting an empty pale blue back up at the cloudless sky.

Oleipha curled her toes into the damp sand and felt its sodden grains cool and smooth against her skin. She had risen early, long before the second sun had crested the horizon and bathed the land in its golden glow, and stood alone on the bank of the Siashim soaking in the solitude. Later her village would be a bustle of activity; the men would head to the quarry and begin the daily stream of clay-filled baskets back to the village, the women would gather around the lakeshore and gossip over laundry, the children would see to their chores, and when done, they would play and their laughter would touch everything.

_Purchase links for the full novella DRM-free at http://welshpixie.rocks/warden-a-gay-fantasy-romance-novella/

Alwyn’s eyes flickered open and focused on the mossy ceiling. Droplets of water trickled down white-yellow stalactites and dripped in staccato rhythm to the rough stone floor.

His head hurt, his skin was clammy. His heart thudded hard in his chest.

“I know, I know. Not quite the lavish standard of Darkshear’s tavern lodgings, is it?”

His neck hurt too, and he winced as he turned in the direction of the voice. A dark figure leaned against the back wall, one leg cocked up, hands tucked loosely into his waistband.