 [THREAD] If you are queer (or are an admin who cares about the safety of your queer users), do yourself a favour and block Mastodon.Art. This is their response to recent credible death threats against Furry.Engineer users. To be very clear, the "racism and harassment" mentioned here is reporting serious and credible death threats against a Furry.Engineer user. https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/on-instance-blocks-and-racism 51 comments | Expand all CWs
Mastodon.art's admin has a long history of specifically targeting queer instances with lies about racism. This continues to cause damage to queer communities, which are essential for survival in the face of international trans genocide. But she does not target all queer instances equally, and uses this in her defence. If you're out and passing (and usually wealthy and neurotypical), she's willing to use you as a shield instead of attacking you. It is also important to understand that there is no level of apologizing or trying to make peace that will work to appease Mastodon.Art. Tech.LGBT mods spent a month writing an extensive apology, because one of their admins made a comment about potential risks related to blocklists. The apology was used as an excuse to further slander and direct harassment towards Tech.LGBT. The Furry.Engineer user at the center of this conflict. The one who was accused of "racism and harassment" for reporting death threats against himself. He left the instance. And it still wasn't good enough. Causing harm to queer communities is the only goal of Mastodon.Art. Everything else is an excuse to justify causing that harm. I get that Mastodon.Art is a big instance and defederation is hard. But the safety of your queer users is more important. You don't need to start a fight. You don't need to get into the "drama". But you do need to block Mastodon.Art. A small postscript: Attacking furries as a form of crypto-homophobia was pioneered by 4chan and is currently popular among the Qanon-right as part of the "litter boxes in highschool bathrooms" conspiracy theories. Furry.Engineer is a small instance of a few hundred users. Mastodon.Art is one of the largest instances we have here. I am only writing this thread because Curator decided to write a blog post attacking a small furry instance, weeks after this conflict ended and they had given her everything she had asked for. While it's impossible to know what's in Curator's heart, it would be naive to ignore the pattern of furry-bashing associated with these blocklist organizations and the history of furry-bashing as a homophobic political strategy. Curator is very familiar with 4chan culture The "Navy Seal" meme she referenced earlier came out of 4chan at the same time a lot of this anti-furry homophobia was at (what was then) a peak. This is the time and place that "Yiff in hell, furfag" came from. While I don't think Curator's experience with 4chan is necessarily disqualifying, I think it's important to understand it in the context of her clear pattern of queerphobia. Above I referred to Furry.LGBT, when I meant Furry.Engineer. This has been fixed in an edit. Tech.LGBT and Furry.Engineer faced attacks from transphobic blocklists recently (including Mastodon.Art's). Furry.LGBT faced attacks from transphobic blocklists (including Mastodon.Art's) approximately 10 months ago.  @fedilore I didn't read this whole essay tbf, but this was a very disingenuous thread in the opening parts at the very least. In my own essay: You've framed this as action that should be taken against .art by people that care about the safety of queer users, and gone on an attack against a Black trans person and neglected to reveal that fact (do *you* care about them? @fedilore @fedilore It's heartbreaking that it had to get that far and *still* didn't work, because they're *still* being harassed and mischaracterised and their own queerness erased within threads like this to push some sort of ".art iz bad because they blocked my friend omgzz" message. @Shrigglepuss If you don't want people talking about this stuff, then bring it up with WelshPixie. There hasn't been a single time in the last year that queer people started this drama This whole thing had died down, until WelshPixie wrote a blog post slandering queer communities. Queer people, outside of a handful of big cities, cannot safely organize locally. Queer online spaces are essential to the very existence of most queer community. To specifically target those survival communities for mass-defederation, without clear documented evidence that it's necessary, is an action with genocidal purpose and genocidal effect. @Shrigglepuss @fedilore you also clearly don't care about "block evading", since welshpixie did that right after she kicked off tech.lgbt and posted about it, the posts are still up. @aurorapenguin Violence, credible or otherwise, is totally fine against bigotry imo. *Any* action against bigotry is fair game if it makes it fuck off. Not a bigot? Nothing to fear then is there 🤷 @aurorapenguin I see their entirely fake-ass and funny as fuck response to an absolute barnacle that can't let go of harassing somebody's "300" kills, and continue the fantasy of 300 more dead racists on top. You're just going to have to get over it and spend this energy on sorting your shitty mates out instead @Shrigglepuss "anyone that criticizes me is racist and white and im justified to threaten and enact violence against them", just keep repeating that to yourselves as you cheer on banning queer instances :)  @aurorapenguin @fedilore mekka's original thread talked about how trans women have a Nazi phase He did edit that specific dog whistle out after it was pointed out to him, but no others Made it clear where a lot of info is coming from @aurorapenguin @fedilore edit history is preserved - not able to get a link right now to the thread, but it's in the edit history @aurorapenguin @fedilore he's actually now filtered with a warning now for me because he has enough clout I benefit from the context of knowing of his posts are being boosted but I want to be in a place to choose to access them @deilann @aurorapenguin Original version of this post, visible in the edits. @deilann @aurorapenguin I put less stock in the "Nazi phase" memes than the rest of that post, where he ignores how trans people (and disabled people) have always been the groups most at risk from Nazi violence and ideology. @fedilore @aurorapenguin yeah it was more a sign of where some of his info is coming from The interaction with Gigi was the most concerning imo Then later in another thread refusing to acknowledge the harassment I received and stating I hadn't acknowledged the harassment Ro received which is untrue @deilann Oh fun. He compares a referee making a bad call at a game to the frequent and reckless destruction of queer survival communities. I really just don't think he thinks discrimination against queer people is real. Our lives are not sports. @deilann @aurorapenguin It's all so much more than I can keep track of. The dude jumping into my replies with bad faith concern troll stuff is also comparing trans women to Nazis and is also management at Google and is also working to build a system to lock all his transphobia into Mastodon by default. That is too many things. @deilann @aurorapenguin @fedilore He also very swiftly dismissed then blocked a black trans woman who argued with him over this, and claimed another black person arguing with him over it wasn't really black, because...they didn't have that many twitter followers in common. No joke. He figured a real black activist would follow more of the same people as him. Accused him of faking being black. @kobld @aurorapenguin yeah like @fedilore said too much to concisely state/keep track of Mastodon.Art defending death threats against a user of Furry.Engineer: https://mastodon.social/@fedilore/111287360787964517 Two weeks later, Mastodon.Art writes a blog post defending the continued isolation of Furry.Engineer, describing a fairly mild response to queerphobia and death threats as "racism and harassment", while completely ignoring the death threats and queerphobia. https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/on-instance-blocks-and-racism  considering how I saw my own posting was practically *surveilled* in the one awful month I was on dot art I was...absolutely ***floored*** to say the LEAST that such a thing would be considered only a "joke" and was an appropriate reaction to valid criticism. That whole corner of Fedi is just absolute poison. Block it all, not just art. The whole corner should be defedded. I did and I'm much happier because of it.  @fedilore I'm the first person to say that defederation is an extreme measure that shouldn't be taken until other avenues have been exhausted. But the Mastodon.art admins have proven again and again that they are reactionary sorts that defederate at the drop of a hat and don't take criticism well at all. I think they definitely earned a fediblock at this point. @zorinlynx I think Mastodon.Art's involvement in this whole thing makes everything much more harmful for everybody involved, just because of the sheer numbers. WelshPixie will never experience homophobia or transphobia or racism. She just has a big instance and likes to feel important. @fedilore As someone who isn't trying to get involved with bullshit but is still affected by it, I'm honestly mystified. When the underprivileged engage in a pissing match amongst themselves, the only winners are the privileged. I'm not sure how much retaliating against dot-Art is going to accomplish, even if its leadership is operating in bad faith. @bersl2 I do my best to focus my attention on the largest involved instance, which is an instance with a white admin. Ultimately, this isn't about queer people vs black people. Both sides are very diverse, in terms of race; gender; and sexuality. Ultimately, this is about one very large instance whose admin doesn't actually have a stake in any of this, and is getting people hurt on both sides by lobbing attacks. |
Gregory's Server
Mastodon.art still federates with Scholar.Social, the instance responsible for the death threats.
The Scholar.Social user who made the death threats is friends with the Mastodon.Art admin.
The death threats were specific, and revealed private information about the victim that made clear that they were in serious and immediate danger.