Fedi Famous
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.
And then went straight off to BlueSky to tug on Jack Dorsey's sleeve.
(Alt text: jack @jack.bsky.social “All I made happen was get a team focused on the idea. There will be many implementations of the same idea and that's a good thing.” Kris Nóva @krisnova.net “Is there a way I could talk to the group? Both about implementation detail from an open source perspective, as well as content moderation? I just walked away from admin of a Mastodon instance of 50k technologists and am a Principal engineer at GitHub.”)
Let's rephrase all of the above.
In April 2022 a tech personality span up a Mastodon instance, positioned themselves at the helm with the 'admin' badge, and over the next months grew a community of 50k people who chose that instance and put their trust in the administrator (I've been told that she was only 'admin' as in 'sysadmin' and only responsible for server things, and not moderation, but creating an instance and having the 'admin' badge comes with some preconceptions of ownership and responsibility on the fediverse).
During those months she said some bad things, and because she was positioned as being the custodian of that instance and responsible for its reputation on the fediverse, every time she said a bad thing other instances would silence or defederate, as is their right, cutting off that instance's members from a little part of the wider fediverse. Eventually, after One Bad Thing too many, and more instances choosing to distance themselves from hers, she decided she didn't want to be held accountable any more and abandoned all of the people who had chosen her stewardship on the fediverse, choosing instead to go somewhere else and get involved all over again with another social network, bragging about how she had just “walked away from” 50k people.
And THAT is what leaves me bitter about the whole thing. The Mastodon instance was her playground, an experiment, jumping into the cool new social networking site and bringing along the people who knew and trusted her from elsewhere, growing her cult of personality until, yeah, it became one of the more prominent communities here – but then walking away when it got too real.
Because being in charge of people, and of how you represent those people when interacting with the community you've brought them into, is absolutely real. Community management is hard work that demands a lot of emotional toil, of listening to and understanding people and learning and growing and doing better when called to task. It's responsibility and yeah it's really fucking hard and often means you have to eat a shitload of humble pie but that's the gig and nobody should be entering into any kind of community management position if they're not prepared for some really hard work.
Of course anyone should be able to walk away when it gets too much; of course anyone should absolutely be able to take a step back, or hand over, or bow out, for their mental and emotional well-being when the stress and anxiety is overwhelming; but nobody should choose community management in the first place, especially of a community with open growth that surges over the course of those short months to numbers that put it up there with the bigger communities on the fediverse, if they aren't prepared for putting in the hard work – especially when they are themselves the very reason people chose that community in the first place.
It's an abuse of power and trust and popularity, and the people on Hachyderm were pawns in a game of 'how big of a fedi personality can I become, how much collateral defederation damage am I willing to inflict upon my community members, before I get tired of being held accountable and bail'.
And now there's a community of 50,000 people and a moderation team left behind trying to undo that damage and re-establish connections and rebuild trust and pick up the pieces, because one person wanted to be fedi famous and damn the consequences.
* “Bad Things” in the context of this post refers to racist and classist remarks and actions, receipts of which can be found here