Curator

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.