All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there’s actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I’m wrong.

You know, it reminds me of that as well but I have an opposite take. The forums I was most active on in the early 2000s were generally ones that had split from larger ones and had became smaller but much stronger and more personal communities as a result. You had the luxury of breaking off precisely because there was no expectation that one community would ever have a monopoly for a topic. Maybe my experience is unique, I don't know.

I can't speak for the specific situation here because I don't know anything about these instances. But the ability for people to split off after a terminal disagreement has generally struck me as a strong point to the voluntary federation we have.

It's not beef between two admins. Mastodon.art is strictly a "safes pace", so the admin choses what's safe.

Obviously, an instance admin having no issues with racism is a big fucking red flag about how they mod their instance.

In order to protect their instance and people on it, it's safer to defederate, than count "strikes" and send warnings.

Meh, it's their instance they can do what they like. Not a fan? Move to another instance, it takes two clicks.

Yeah drama sucks, but we all get to pick a side (or not) and move on. All this really does is give both parties attention, and they seem to be loving it.

I’m pretty sure Akkoma allows for several levels before the admins fully defed another instance. Like, I think one is that they can take an instances off the public timeline. And I think it’ll be great when individual users can block instances (on the server side) so it doesn’t have to be on the admins and have ad much of an effect on the communities at large.

Mastodon drama tends to have another level of hysteria to it caused by the amount "context collapse" the platform creates. There's no search or quoting posts or anything that can really "go viral" ... so news only spreads through rumours and "chinese whispers". Which means once some drama goes viral, any one conversation about it is mostly held in the dark, with people mostly speculating based off of some rumour they heard that has gone through who knows how many cycles of whispers, but because of the uncertainty, and the additional gatekeeping culture of outing "the bad people", a rather elevated energy quickly ensues where people desperately want to know what's going on, sometimes because their instance is implicated which makes it pretty personal, and want something (ie drama) to happen all to the point of convincing themselves that they do know what happened and what needs to be done.

Behind all of that is the stark reality of the context collapse which means that anyone who actually wants to know what's happening will find it strikingly or prohibitively difficult to actually find out, which often gets to the point that people will think they saw the evidence and truly know but will disagree or not actually have the evidence they think they do.

The more I see of it, and hear of the issues BIPOC people have had for similar-ish reasons, the more I think mastodon's design of "safety" and "anti-virality" through limited feature sets is actually an awkward middle ground rather than a good solution.

I think it's too hasty of a conclusion to say they were doctored, at least based on what I saw following the situation. There were suspicions/allegations of it, but no clear evidence.

calckey dev

Is it that person whose name starts with a K? That fellow blocked my server when I had innocently mentioned that the Fedi software I use also has all the features that they're talking about. Of course, after spewing a whole gamut expletives and abusive words. Certainly didn't miss out on anything.

If I were a user of that server, I would run away - AVOID servers where the admins can't maintain their cool, remain calm and collected and take things personally - think of how they would react if you say something against a decision they make.

If you like Pleroma but found it problematic, definitely check out Akkoma!

Well it was enough of an issue to cause yet another fork of Misskey to exist: https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/iceshrimp/commit/a3713af06ffb12b62b1145d08c79b811e9cdf112

Multiple people were able to reproduce this.
So, the assumption that the screenshot is fake is probably wrong.

Altogether, please don't take screenshots as proof of anything.
They are always subjective to how much you trust the source they are coming from.

See https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/5ed98350-328b-42ff-8005-4137fea8642d for a more complete statement.