2.3M people are currently being genocided as the State of Israel withdrew water, food, and electricity from Gaza, while the IDF targets civilian infrastructure, refugee camps, schools, and hospitals with munitions. This is being done with support from big Western countries like the US and UK who have sent military aid to the State of Israel with no conditions on how that aid is used.

If you wish to help, here's who we recommend donating to:

Medical Aid for Palestinians: https://www.map.org.uk The Palestinian Children's Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net

However, since aid into Gaza is being limited by the State of Israel and there's currently no guarantee of if or when any physical or financial aid will reach them, it's equally important to attend rallies and protests, and to pressure your local politicians via letters or phone calls for an immediate ceasefire.

We will moderate as follows:

We won't tolerate any arguments about whether words like genocide, apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, nation-state, ethno-state are accurate or not. What's happening to the people in Gaza is a genocide and what the State of Israel is inflicting is colonialism.

Regarding Zionism: defending an ideology that is currently justifying killing over 2 million people is not a place to find nuance. We will take into consideration who is posting, what power disparities are at play, and who is being oppressed when people post about Zionism, but will be on the lookout for antisemitism.

'From the river to the sea' is a restorative call for the land and its people to live and thrive together. We are aware that it can be used as an antisemitic dog-whistle and will moderate against antisemitism but won't otherwise moderate against use of the phrase.

We will try our best to fact-check reports of propaganda and fake news. We'll always focus on protecting people's lives over spreading misinformation that encourages hate, violence, and oppression. We will ask people to include sources for any claims made, if none were given.

We will defend people over states/nations/governments/countries. The situation is not black and white, and you can support the people in Palestine without wishing harm on the people in Israel, and vice versa. We will moderate against anyone wishing harm on people, and in a way that protects the vulnerable and oppressed.

We have a diverse moderation team, and where we receive reports regarding the I/P conflict, we will wait until several of us have had a chance to look at the report before discussing action.

Q: Can we unsuspend furry.engineer?

If the admin's actions renew our faith that they will properly moderate racism and harassment yeah, but that will take time. Our trust in them has been eroded to the point that we feel it's safer not to expose the BIPoC people on our instance to that potential abuse knowing their admin is so reluctant to actually handle racism. It's not on US to excuse that behaviour for the sake of preserving connections – doing that does not help make fedi any safer for BIPoC folk. It's on other instances to do better and take reports of racism seriously – any blame for way these events unfolded is theirs.

Q: Can't we block connections with specific users rather than blocking a whole instance, which feels like punishing both communities?

We can, but if we can't trust the moderation team of another instance to properly handle reports of their users, we defederate, for the safety of our marginalised community. Take this up with furry.engineer and ask why they didn't find it necessary to deal with the racist abuse and harassment coming from their instance for weeks. We're not punishing the BIPoC folk on our instance by shielding them from racism, and no-one's convenience of accessing people on a social media network is more important than protecting marginalised groups from targeted harassment. Being able to exist on social media without being a target for harassment is a privileged position that not everyone enjoys and that most people don't have to think about.

Q: Re. restoring faith in the admin/mod team, are you waiting for them to acknowledge their mistakes and say they'll do better?

This could be one thing yes- acknowledging the harm caused, taking steps so that it doesn't happen again and communicating what those steps are, and rebuilding a reputation for good moderation which will take time. But we have unsuspended instances that have done this and demonstrably improved their moderation. Diversifying their mod team is another thing they could do, taking anti-racism training, etc..

General rambling on .art's moderation/defederation practices:

https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/dotarts-moderation-policies-and-racism I made this post a little while back that kinda talks about that aspect of it – that we're an instance of working artists who need access to an audience, and balancing that against protecting the most marginalised people in our community that we exist for in the first place to provide a safe community where they're protected from harassment.

We know it's difficult to balance that and we think hard about decisions involving defederating sizeable instances because we know it's cutting people off from income sources, whereas if we don't, that establishes a precedent where racism/transphobia/etc. is tolerated above the rights of people to exist without abuse.

masto.art is not the best instance for someone who wants unfettered access to the whole of fedi without risk of some of that being taken away. We are very strict. We serve a particular community. We're big, which implies we might be the 'best' art instance to join for a big audience, but that's not necessarily the case and why we try to make it very clear on our /about page that we do defederate more harshly than other instances.

We're also pretty clear on our /about page that we proactively moderate; when an instance gets to a point where we expect harassment to come from there, we will defederate to spare people having to go through any abuse and harassment, rather than wait for that to happen and have to clean up afterwards.

Instance admins/mods represent the kind of content they'll allow unchallenged on their instance. So even though some of the SilverEagle posts were deleted, and the account actually migrated to its own instance, it took weeks for anything to happen at all, and the admin posted about not caring to moderate those reports. So we know that that's the kind of environment the admin is happy to have on their instance, that racism and harassment and abuse will go unchallenged for weeks, and that makes it an unsafe instance for us to federated with.

Yes, technically, we can do other instance's moderation work for them – ban the admin, individually moderate their users – but that shouldn't be our job – managing masto.art is enough work in itself and I'm not going to ask unpaid volunteers to start manually moderating all the other instances where the mod team has fucked up and we don't trust them to moderate themselves.

Q: But the problem with furry.engineer has been corrected?

Just checked our reports. There were four accounts reported from furry.engineer, SilverEagle is one of them who has moved, three others are still there. Those do not include the admin, who was giving all of it a free pass. So no, it hasn't been corrected.

The posts on furry.engineer included targeting several Black fedi users over the course of a few weeks, directing racist abuse and harassment at them, creating and pushing racist conspiracy theories about them with no foundation in truth that weren't being challenged by the instance admin at all and were allowed to exist and propagate in the face of the harm they were causing and being reported by several instances, which led to more people joining in with the abuse and lies – it was horrid. It made Black folks on fedi feel unsafe – not just those who were directly targeted, but those who were watching it all unfold without being moderated by the instance admin – and a lot of folk stepped away from fedi for a while because of it.

It was horrible, and that kind of thing has long-term ramifications on fedi as a whole and why Black folk have to continuously fight for themselves here, and continuously stress that fedi has a racism problem. The several BIPoC on our mod team, who are all struggling artists barely managing to scrape through each month, emphatically did not want to federate our community with that instance because of the behaviour from some of that instance's users that the admin didn't moderate. Our BIPoC community on masto.art no doubt feel the same – in fact we've had people move to our instance away from their own because we're safer for them than the instances they were on, because we take a hard stance against stuff like this.

We know it's stressful and anxiety-inducing being cut off from a paying audience and your source of income. We have to balance that with the severity of things other instances allow to happen and the impacts they have on the people in our community, and their safety – even before their ability to earn a living, just their ability to exist online without getting harassed off.

It is really tough. The ideal solution is that racism would not be tolerated on the source instances that it's coming from and those users would immediately be suspended.

Failing that, when racism is given a pass on those instances, the ideal solution is that people who oppose that would move off those instance to ones that takes racism (or whatever bigotry is going un-moderated) seriously.

If people did that, the bigoted instances would either cease to exist or would be left only with a tiny group of bigots that would get defederated into their own little voids, and the communities of masto.art, and other instances, could just carry on without losing anything of value.

What I would like to see, in an ideal world, is that instead of people on here going 'masto.art suspended this instance for racism so now I have to move to another instance' is, rather, 'masto.art suspended this instance for racism, so if you want to keep following me, and if you oppose racism, and want to support a fedi that's safe for BIPoC, I expect you'll be moving to an instance that doesn't give a free pass to racism'.

The people on fedi have the power to shape what kind of social media experience this is. If your instance, or the instance your friend is on, is letting its community harass Black folk, move from that instance, tell your friends to move. Tell them to stand by their principles. Don't support it. Don't make your online home in a place that allows racism.

Most people don't bother, and when we do, like when masto.art takes a hard stance against federating with instances that allow hate speech, we're the ones that get the flack for it. Which seems the wrong way around.

Because I've been on fedi so long, and because of the company I kept from my personal account, I've been around for the conflict. Some of that conflict – probably the biggest thing – was when a few PoC span up their own instance as a means of setting their own boundaries and moderating against harassment themselves, without having to rely on the server admins of individual instances to take their word on what was or wasn't racism, etc.

They were around until 2020. December 31st, actually. Are0h's last post is still cached on our instance – https://playvicious.social/@Are0h/105476726720269350 (you'll have to load that internally through masto's search bar).

They closed because they were harassed off fedi by a huge, disgusting wave of racism, abuse, and harassment against their admin Ro, some of their mods (one of whom who is now a mod on .art), and their users. The harassment was vicious. All the instances that participated in it are blocked from mastodon.art because of the part they played.

Some of them left fedi for good, some of them (like Ro) came back on single-user instances, some of them moved to smaller safe instances. So again, PoC are back to relying on other instance admins to create spaces for them that are safe, where racism (and any form of bigotry) isn't tolerated, where Black folk can exist – just exist! – online without facing constant micro-aggressions in their mentions.

.art had already been working to that goal when I took over, and already had a team of mods committed to taking a very hard stance against bigotry and racism. Since then we've expanded our mod team to include a great deal of diversity and breadth of marginalized voices. We provide a safe space for all of them; for BIPoC, disabled people, neurodiverse people, queer people, nonbinary people, Jewish people – anyone who faces marginalization.

But we're also big. We're by no means the biggest, but because of our domain name, because we're what comes up when you search for 'mastodon art instance', because of the Twitter exoduses that have happened, because we already exist and joining an existing instance is a much lower barrier to entry than creating your own, people join us, and we grow (not indefinitely – we have a cap of 12k active users, as that's when our local timeline becomes too busy to be useful).

This gives people certain expectations of what we are, and what we can provide for them. Recently we've edited our /about page to be clearer about this – to be clearer that we defederate from instances that break our rules, that are inherently unsafe, and that we aren't an open-federation instance and we DO have strict rules.

We also have to acknowledge that we are big, and until there are more options on fedi for places artists can be among their own and still get widely seen, we have to (to some extent) strike a compromise between safety and still being able to provide working artists access to an audience.

This is why we still federate with mastodon.social, but defederate other instances that one would think, at a glance, are safer than mastodon.social. Some of the instances we've defederated from have a history of intentional decisions that resulted in marginalised people being harmed and their safety not considered. Their mods and their admins are complicit, perhaps not deliberately, but complicit by enacting their intent in a way they felt fit, but the consequences of which were harmful.

Mastodon.social, on the other hand, are passively bad. They're not, actually, terrible – their moderation has improved. They do remove racism, they do remove antisemitism, they do block blatantly bigoted accounts (but sometimes they need to be reported a few times before getting actioned). They're still problematic, but they're also hundreds of thousands of potential art buyers. So we weigh that, and for now, the risk for us is manageable and they haven't acted in a way that, with intent, harms marginalized communities.

We know that this won't be acceptable for everyone, particularly for people who signed up expecting an experience closer to Twitter and weren't expecting that their reach would be cut down based on the needs of the community around them and the moral principles of the people who manage that community.

But we won't stop doing it, because that goes against the primary reason our instance exists – dotART, first and foremost, above all else, is a safe space for marginalised people. That is very clear on our /about page, and it's the main reason a LOT of our users join us – because this, the defederating from instances that we don't feel we can trust the moderation of, is exactly what they want.

We, the mod team, don't care if that leaves us with a couple of hundred active users who exist in a little isolated bubble in some small cut-off corner of fedi, if that corner is providing those couple of hundred people a space where they can exist without bigotry and harassment.

An upcoming patch for Mastodon, which is currently in the testing phase, will introduce federated cross-instance full text search (meaning, you could enter the word 'watercolours' into the search box and see any public posts from discoverable profiles from your instance and other federated instances that have used the word 'watercolours' in the post).

This is dependent on having ElasticSearch (ES) enabled, which mastodon.art does not (by choice, currently). So, here's a hypothetical scenario:

.art does not have ES enabled .other DOES have ES enabled .art user enables discovery, makes a public post, this post federates to .other that post is now searchable on .other But because .art does not have ES enabled, .art users can't use the search feature.

So even if your instance doesn't have ES enabled, this doesn't mean that your users won't be affected by this new full text search implementation.

How it will work:

On instances with ES enabled, the public posts of profiles that have the 'suggest account to others' box ticked WILL be indexed for text search.

Unlisted posts will NOT be indexed, regardless of this setting (but note that unlisted posts also don't show up in any of the public feeds (local/federated timelines) and won't be included in hashtag search results, so if you want to make a post with hashtags and want people to be able to find that post by searching for the hashtag, it has to be made with 'public' visibility).

Here's what you need to do to opt your content OUT of being indexed for full text search;

https://mastodon.art/settings/profile (substitute with your own instance URL if you're not on mastodon.art) > uncheck the 'suggest account to others' box.

With this checkbox unticked, even if you make public posts, they will not be indexed.

You can also turn the checkbox on, which means that any posts you make with the 'public' visibility *will be indexed, but posts made with the 'unlisted' visibility will not be indexed.

There is currently no way to have your account be discoverable (i.e., to be recommended to others via the Profile Directory, https://mastodon.art/directory) while not being indexed, unless all of your posts are made with the 'unlisted' visibility setting; with the current iteration of the feature, it's all or nothing. So unfortunately, if you want to entirely opt out of being indexed, you'll also have to sacrifice some discoverability of your profile.

There are other opt-in profile discovery directories you can use instead, though:

https://fedi.directory https://fediverse.info https://communitywiki.org/trunk

It's also important to note that currently, anyone who has the checkbox enabled but who doesn't see the updates about the scope of that checkbox changing to include opting in to search, will be opted in by default just by virtue of not being given a heads up to uncheck that box.

Relevant info for techier people than I:

The PR: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26344 One of the devs saying it's likely to make it into the 4.2.0 release: https://oisaur.com/@renchap/110856034083717387 The 'discoverable' setting: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23808 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/4caa9f0e69f922ce70af50d695cc84a7f551534f/app/services/activitypub/process_account_service.rb#L117

Post talking about various issues with search and why it should be opt-in: https://www.anildash.com/2023/01/16/a-fediverse-search/

I'll do my best to answer questions, you can find me at https://mastodon.art/@curator ! :D

Massive thanks to other instance admins and to Hugo of MastoHost who helped me gather all of this into this post, who've been tracking the GitHub, fact-checking in the official Discord, and feeding back on the info that's in this post <3

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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