@aral @fosstodon Hmpf you're making every disagreement on strategies, e.g. whether we should federate with P92 or not, as a fundamental disagreement on our values. Yeah Fosstodon might have silenced you because they would think free software would be ruined by organizations asserting their own moral judgements on their audiences already so they wouldn't want yours to spread there, according to a well documented phenomenon that _Facebook has leveraged to split the fediverse and encourage defederations and other kinds of defect from people concentrating too much power, you doofus_. Maybe the P92/Threads audience is an asset for the fediverse and maybe our own judgement is biased because some of us are Facebook/Twitter survivors. Speaking as someone who's found half of the arguments to pre-emptively defederate from Facebook.

Maybe that “meeting under NDA” move was similar to transferring them a license for contents we share there or in connection to them, preventing privacy/free software advocates from communicating there: to get the most radical instance admins to defederate. From a chaotic neutral point of view, this is an elegant solution to the problem of having to censor each instance individually and taking the blame for it.

And there are also excellent reasons to do this (pre-emptive defederation).

What I can see of your post on the Fedora forum on your account – asking the Fedora developers if opt-out telemetry will be implemented in their enterprise distribution – feels weird, because I've actually enabled some degree of temeletry in Fedora, i.e. anonymized performance reports, to help them to improve their product. That's literally why they're developing Fedora, because RHEL is a stable fork. IBM has imposed layoffs on Red Hat and now they're doing union busting but I don't think that would be super relevant in the context of technical, GDPR-compliant telemetry. Someone has answered you they posted something on the forum and again, I won't read it, but what I can see on your account is basically implicit calls to hate (because you're posting to thousands of people, some of whom having an abusive socio-technical environment) and divisive.

And you're making it all about you being the good free software developer and them being the defected free software instance admins, and you're wondering why someone would silence you? I understand that your NPO could be scarce, you could be wondering whether or not you'll be able to continue your work next year, and I think it's important by the way, but then there's your work at the Small Net Foundation and there's your Mastodon account.

A common and especially nefarious mistake in political communication is to make moral judgements. An FSF member told me it was important to have a radical line, and I disagreed, saying that it was important to have a clear line, and then to let people decide whether it's more important to them to use free software or to get their diplomas. People have their own moral senses and they tend to take good decisions in their own environments and contexts, left-wing political propaganda should strive to share information and should take common moral judgements in account of course, but not try to change their audiences'! Now, sharing moral judgements increases an _illusion_ of solidarity when people approve what you say or hit the ‘fav’ button, but this is an illusion, you're actually weakening your cause by getting these posts shared.

With all of my respect towards you, your values, and your work, your communication here feels misguided. I think we could have a conversation anywhere you'd like and agree on all of what you're doing, except this small communication mistake that marginalizes your work among your ~40,000 followers (and their own social graphs).