Curator

Following several incidents of racism and classism by the Hachyderm admin over the past few months that paint a picture of the white classist privelige so often found in tech communities, the most recent of which is a change of their rules to ban fundraising (which impacts marginalised people the most), our mod team has conferred and we will be silencing Hachyderm and will likely move to defederation if the instance remains hostile to queer, disabled, and BIPOC folk, as per .art's policy of fostering a safe environment for our marginalised users and silencing/defederating instances that are hostile to marginalised people.

Fundraising, donations, and begposts help provide a buffer against the ravages of capitalism and are essential for the survival of the people that capitalism ostracises, and are usually embraced within the fediverse and its goals of decentralization. .art will always allow these kinds of posts; please keep sharing your donation links and asking for financial help if you need it.

As always, silences and defederations need not be permanent and we continuously evaluate our decisions and reverse them when appropriate.

(Update, we're aware that Hachyderm are revisiting the 'no fundraising' rule but we still feel that this is overall part of a clear pattern of behaviour and our above stance still holds.)

(Further update; we've seen Nova's posts about stepping down as admin and handing over the instance to The Nivenly Foundation (that Nova is also a part of). We'll discuss this but likely means we'll keep the instance silenced while we see how that change unfolds and how the instance is managed/moderated thereafter.)

(Edit April 29th: For the sake of transparency, the links to receipts in the first paragraph were added after Nova's exit posts, and following a conversation that happened in the Hachyderm Discord channel where Nova expressed the feeling that she was being dogpiled because one small instance linked to this dot-art post as their reason for silencing Hachyderm, specifically because this post at the time contained no receipts. For further context, the background events that led to the decision to silence (not defederate) Hachyderm, that the receipts above demonstrate, were all at the time brought to Nova's attention as being problematic and large discussions were had in comment threads of Nova's original posts where people were explaining to her, for example, why comparing things to slavery and criticizing the people pointing out that users on Hachyderm were abusing the fediblock tag (which was created for the safety of PoC on the fediverse) is bad. So, here are the receipts of the racist/classist things that Nova was absolutely already aware of as being racist/classist.)