@design_RG Eugene generally isnt very good with integrating other peoples opinions in general, not just about mastodon.

I dont think he means wrong by it, but I have never seen the man ever personally change his opinion on something. Moreover if someone tries to push his opinion in one direction or the other he seems to be resistive to it to the point of digging in deeper in the opposite directly.

You dont know this but the small handful of instances that declared we are fascist assholes and started blocking us all really started with some comments eugene made in the early days of QOTO that pretty much just started the trend of people trying to hate on us.

A few months after QOTO was established there was one user (now exiled from the fediverse ironically) who was trying his best to get me to say something to prove I was a fascist and drilling me with "what would you do as a moderator" in various border line situations. My answers were generally "well it depends".

He then started demanding i answer what I would do if someone said "It is ok to be white".. I said soemthing like "Well it depends on the context of their feed overall. If there is no indication of racism of any kind and it was a comment they made in isolation but otherwise shows acceptance of other races then I wouldnt have a problem with the statement".. Of course at that moment the user erupted in anger about us being fascists and allowing "nazi dog whistles" and what not. To which i politely defended.

Anyway it was rather isolated to just us in the conversation but someone jumped in, tagging @Gargron and said something like "Hey eugen you should check out this thread, there is some nazi shit going on here".. I politely said "I highly doubt eugen is going to be that absurd and see anything here as remotely racist".

Anyway an hour later eugene popped in and was furious that I dare speak for him and assume what his opinion was. He would up agreeing with the people attacking me and publicly stated he would act on the claim. At that point eugene did the unthinkable and silenced the whole of the QOTO server from mastodon.social, effectively showing he labeled us as fascists.

I then quickly appealed to the whole moderator community over at M.S and asked for an explanation and tried to get the silence resolved. I asked them for a specific explanation of what they objected to. They said they would discuss it, eugen never actually contributed in that discussion at all. It took many days before I could even get an answer out of them, weeks in fact I think and had to ask them ever few days for an update. It seemed they were just trying to stall. eventually without much of an explanation they agreed to remove the silence. By that point the damage had already been done and the QOTO reputation ruined partly by the anti-endorsement of eugen himself.

Since then I have been the bigger man and generally eugen has been responsive to me when I message him. So I hold no hard feelings. Though the issue did seem to crop up again when I tried to get us on joinmastodon.com which got similar resistance and apparent stalling, but eventually because I persisted we got on there too.

Anyway I'm not mad at Eugene but he really dropped the ball and it has hurt QOTO ever since that day. He has made no effort to publicly apologize or correct for the damage he did, so while I dont hold a grudge he did loose some serious points with me to be honest.