Curator

(Note: We have always moderated cultural appropriation on .art, and this policy has always existed, unwritten – this is just us adding it to our code of conduct in a more official capacity)

Cultural appropriation is “The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.”

Creators should always be mindful of the role that cultural history plays in the development and adoption of artistic styles and ideas. While it's natural for artists to experiment with different mediums, colours, and techniques, as this is how we learn and grow as artists and develop our own set of skills and styles, it's also important that we don't mis-use or mis-contextualise cultural work.

Cultural appropriation can include:

• Reproducing artwork from other cultures
• Using cultural artwork as a costume
• Appropriating facets of another culture to use in your own art

Knowing that this is a nuanced topic, we'll always approach reports of cultural appropriation by involving people who can speak for their cultures relevant to the artwork in question.

This is an announcement and information post for members of mastodon.art.

mastodon.art has limited firefish.social and moving to suspend in a week. If you have contacts on firefish.social that you'd like to keep, take this time to message them and figure something out. <3

We had previously suspended stop.voring.me because the admin, ThatOneCalculator/Kainoa, was federating with, and interacting with, a well known anti-black harasser Eris from akko.disqordia.space (https://thebad.space/location/073b336e-3a39-4e2d-b4e0-9e1d8e7d58c3 , more below). If you've been on the fediverse a while you'll be familiar with that instance and the user as notable for constant harassment, abuse, anti-blackness, and block evasion used to continue to harass.

At the time, ThatOneCalculator was in the 'Fedimins' Discord space that .art has in our Discord backrooms with a bunch of other instance admins where we communicate, support each other, etc. There are PoC in there who have been directly targeted and harassed by Eris, so when we found out, we removed ThatOneCalculator from the room, DMed to explain why, and then suspended their instance from .art with the same note.

We've found out today that firefish.social, the renamed calckey.social, is not just federating with Disqordia UPDATE, firefish.social have silenced Disqordia: https://firefish.social/notes/9hpajgawuuy84piz and https://firefish.social/notes/9hpa84jcdzyxyr1u , but that ThatOneCalculator/Kainoa, who is the lead developer of Calkey, is boosting Eris's posts.

Image receipt here: https://mastodon.art/@welshpixie/110787367946264359

As explained on our about page (https://mastodon.art/about), .art defederates from any instance that doesn't take a firm stance against racism or that makes space for racists to exist without repercussion.

For an explanation of why we suspend the full instance in situations like this: https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/dotart-as-a-safe-space-instance

Eris receipts: https://rage.love/@puf/108829412633265534 Editing a screenshot of someone criticising her to look like Hitler: https://archive.ph/FnETX Slurs and harassment: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/q9vFQ

This is a tiny sample. Eris and Disqordia appear in the fediblock tag frequently.

EDIT: Addition, Kainoa/ThatOneCalculator has forged a screenshot of our Discord conversation to paint me in a bad light: https://mastodon.art/@welshpixie/110788232121017336 Their post archived at: https://archive.ph/h3ati

This is an announcement and information post for members of mastodon.art.

We have limited federate.social and will be moving to a suspend in a week, giving users of both instances who have follow relationships time to arrange staying in contact. We have also already suspended the abusive user that caused the below.

The reason (shared with permission from Nuz):

https://cutie.city/@nuz/110731201263400207

The report that was made to federate.social about the user's behaviour (also shared with permission):

This user: – Was repeatedly and actively hostile towards other users who had commented in good faith. – Invoked his white privilege to dismiss the voices and concerns of multiple marginalized people. – Referred to the above people and their instances (which are all primarily LGBTQ+) as “weirdos”. – Tried to play the victim by accusing the so-called “weirdos” of engaging in the bad-faith arguments and tactics that he himself was pushing (DARVO).

federate.social's server rules state that “Harmful and abusive speech and behaviors include the language and tactics of the white supremacy movement”. Given how accurately that phrase describes M's behavior, I hope to see federate.social properly enforce their own rules.

It's a long post that I encourage you to read through, but the TLDR is very problematic behaviour from one user that included harassment and tone policing People of Colour, and further problematic behaviour from the instance admin who not only did not action reports against that user, but then shared the text of the report with the aggressor (the text of which made it fairly obvious who'd made the report) which escalated the situation and led to increased harassment.

It's the admin's behaviour directly that leads to our decision to defederate; given how the instance admin responded to the report, we don't feel that we would be able to trust any report sent from us to that instance to be handled correctly, and since the admin isn't just not moderating but is actively perpetuating harassment, we're pro-actively defederating to prevent something similar from happening with our users.

We're not approaching the admin to discuss, as it's the admin's actions that lead to this decision.

dotART may be an art instance, but our full and primary purpose is to provide a safe space for marginalised folk who also happen to do creative work. To this end, we have strong policies that shape the vibe of our community and allow our community to thrive in a harassment-free environment.

We have harsh defederation policies where we will defederate from any instance that we (the .art mod team) feel is a threat to the safety of our community; this can be for a variety of reasons, including being a far-right/conspiracy theory/'free speech' instance, not taking a hard stance against hate speech, poor moderation that enables trolling, etc.

We adopt a proactive style to moderation and defederation that, wherever possible, allows us to prevent harassment rather than to deal with it after it has already taken place. We don't demand other instances do things our way – one of the great things about the fediverse is that anyone can run their instance any way they like, and people can join instances with moderation styles that best fit the experience they want from their social media.

For example, we have some of the journalist instances limited because the people in our community are the people who are often treated incredibly poorly in journalism, and it should be their call whether or not they want to ineract with journalists. This is very specific to the vibe of our instance, but doesn't apply universally to all instances.

dotART has a reputation for 'blocking everybody', but the fediverse is huge. There are over 23,000 instances (https://fedidb.org). The biggest one, mastodon.social, who we don't block, has over 1.3 million total users. Our block list has 1024 instances on it (not all of them are blocks, either – some of them are just limits, and a big chunk of them are instances full of Twitter mirrors), and a huge number of them are tiny single-user or 'one person and a few of their friends' instances. The majority of our blocks are also instances who are well known for actively harassing people on instances that don't block them. There are also many, many instances that block much heavier than we do – but because we're big, we get noticed when we take moderation actions.

Most of the people in our community join our instance specifically because of the way we run it. They join via word of mouth from people telling their friends that this is a safe space. People who face unjust discrimination and who are ostracised by society can exist on our instance with thousands of other people who are both like them and also wonderfully different.

We get messages every day from our dotART-ists telling us they appreciate how we run the community, and we get overwhelming support from our community for the moderation decisions we make. We also don't hold a grudge over people who might want to leave our instance because it's too restrictive (and, in fact, encourage people to seek out a community that best fits them!) – again, the great thing about the fediverse is it allows for a multitude of communities that are managed in different styles and that suit a variety of needs.

So, if you're on mastodon.art, that's the kind of experience you will get. We appreciate it's not for everybody, but it's not meant to be for everybody. It's meant to be for the people who most need this kind of safety from social media.

(This, and all post on this blog, are for the members of mastodon.art. This particular post has received unintended broader audience, but as with all announcements here, they are intended for the mastodon.art community.)

We've decided to defederate from Universeodon. This comes following a pattern of behaviour from the admin that makes us uncomfortable, particularly regarding:

• implementing full text search on the instance without being fully open that this is an opt-out service, or providing information on opting out ( https://blog.universeodon.com/mastodon-advanced-search-is-here) (This point has been edited to provide more clarification)
• operating with a 'growth mindset' (https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110368386104645921) and being more concerned with growing the instance than maintaining a healthy community (https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110159817592715989)
• meeting with Meta (https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110521648872299829)
• voicing thoughts about removing the ability to for users to make reports on posts from the public timelines (paste from the official Mastodon discord:

“would it make sense to potentially remove report post from public/local and public timelines? this could alleviate some policing and focus people towards managing their timeline and the agency they have there not sure if that’s even possible but may be worth experimenting with”

• and embracing Meta moving to the fediverse if it means he can make money from it and run the instance as a 'legitimate business' (https://indiepocalypse.social/@tamitha/110566562683658240)

While obviously any admin can run their instance as they see fit, the undercurrent of these messages and behaviour is at a direct odds with how .art runs our instance and how we'd like our corner of the fediverse to be; where the wellbeing of our community is proritised, in an ad- and corpo- free space. We're defederating from Universeodon to maintain the integrity of the space we occupy in the fediverse; we don't want to be federated with an instance that prefers growth over safety and equates making money, especially from the likes of Meta, with 'legitimacy'.

We're moving to a silence now, and will fully suspend in a week, allowing you time to make plans to preserve any connections you might have there.

Web Archive links to posts: https://web.archive.org/web/20230618212652/https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110062408438864731 https://web.archive.org/web/20230618212845/https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110368386104645921 https://web.archive.org/web/20230618213014/https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110159817592715989 https://web.archive.org/web/20230618193233/https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110521648872299829

There are increasing rumours that Meta and Instagram are working on apps that will use ActivityPub and federate with the rest of the fediverse. As the likelihood of this happening shifts more into the realm of the probable, the .art mod team are having discussions about what to do if/when this happens – but the most likely scenario is that we will immediately defederate from those instances.

There are technical reasons why we (and other instances) might want to do that; the November influx from Twitter pretty much brought the fediverse to its knees, and those numbers are a fraction of what the likes of Meta and Insta would bring should they join the federation.

More importantly, though, there are moderation and community reasons as to why .art would not want to federate with such instances.

The majority of our userbase came to the fediverse, and to .art, to escape corporate social media; its lack of moderation, its huge userbase, and the toxicity that those things combined produce. If we want to preserve the cozy, wholesome, and corporate-free vibes that we have at .art, it only makes sense that we would block the likes of Meta and Instagram as soon as they show up.

As our users, you deserve a heads up that this is the most likely course of action we will take. For most of you, I think this will be welcome – but there are probably some people who might want to be on a more openly federated instance, and that's fine.

There's also the slim possibility that when those big social media instances do show up, they'll be very well moderated and generally nice places – in which case we can revisit any blocks we've put in place – but let's be honest, that's a very slim chance XD