Public statement on blocking QOTO.org from Jubilife Global Terminal

The admin of QOTO, Jeffrey “Freemo” Freeman, sent out emails to a number of fediverse admins who block his instance today. In the email I received as well as in some posts I saw on Freeman’s account, he assumes that the reasons for blocking are because of a smear campaign against the instance from one of his former users who got suspended for hate speech as well as for a feature that allows users to subscribe to remote accounts’ RSS feeds in their home timeline without using the ActivityPub follow mechanism. I cannot speak for the administration teams of instances other than my own, but the suspension of QOTO from Jubilife, initially put into place on 22 August 2018, is not to do with the subscription feature or from whatever Snow may or may not have said as these issues postdated the block.
QOTO has a moderation philosophy that is incompatible with how I run Jubilife, as they do not suspend any instances (see their instance short description in the sidebar which includes “We federate with all servers: we don’t block any servers”. Even the “silence” level block is utilized very sparingly; only 4 instances are silenced from QOTO as of this writing. Freeman himself interacts with instances and individuals who we have near-zero tolerance for, as a quick scan of his profile while responding to his email showed boosts from gleasonator.com, gameliberty.club, and shitposter.club. The last of these, SPC, has been a fashy hellhole since before Mastodon existed. There is no excuse for an admin of an instance that has been around since 2018 to be boosting a goddamn thing from SPC. Jubilife and our fellow travelers in the fediverse give no quarter for fascists, and if you do then you are not welcome in our communities.
Freeman’s email and my response are embedded in the gist below:

Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2022 14:33:49 -0600
Subject: Re: Hello, noticed you had us blocked, figured this might be a
mistake.
To: Jeffrey Freeman <[redacted]@qoto.org>
From: Jay Logan <jay@admin.unionroom.xyz>
Looking at your own account I see boosts from Shitposter Club, which has
been a trash fire since the GNU Social days before Mastodon even
existed, as well as from gameliberty.club's admin. This is just me
taking a cursory glance at what you yourself as an instance
administrator choose to boost and already disqualifies your refederation
appeal. I also see your domain blocklist consists of just 4 silences.
Your moderation philosophy and the people you welcome into your spaces
are why you have been defederated from Jubilife Global Terminal since
2018 and will continue to remain defederated.
You are not welcome to contact me again.
On 11/17/2022 2:13 PM, Jeffrey Freeman wrote:
> Hi, I noticed you had QOTO blocked, I figured this might be a mistake
> as there has, for some time, been attempts to lie about our policies
> by some users we blocked for hate speech and sadly some of the
> community followed along.
>
> Snow, some years back, was blocked for hate speech and he began a
> campaign against us spoofing various users claiming we accept hate
> speech on our instance and other outright lies. At one point he even
> attempted to create accounts on QOTO that posted hate speech and
> despite getting suspended shortly after, by doing so in the middle of
> the night, some of it was noticed for the short time it was up.
>
> My guess is some of this misinformation made its way to you and you,
> understandably, may have blocked our instance.
>
> We also had some similar trouble many years ago where the LGBTQ
> community was being attacked and they fled, en masse to our server
> (which is how our server became so popular early on). This caused
> several people to attack us in a similar manner spreading quite a few
> lies as well.
>
> For more information detailing that incident please see this post, it
> also explains our subscribe feature, which is privacy-respecting and
> provides the same level of access as using an RSS reader to follow
> an account: https://qoto.org/@freemo/109319817943835261
>
> I urge you to actually review our timeline and see for yourself, hate
> speech, harassment, misinformation, etc has never been tolerated in
> our instance and still is not.
>
> To recap some of the misinformation:
>
> 1) We have very strict and aggressively enforced policies against hate
> speech in all forms, you wont find any on our timeline and if you do
> and report it you will find it is usually acted on with a suspension
> very quickly.
>
> 2) Our subscribe feature is privacy respecting and was specifically
> implemented to protect the physical safety of our LGBTQ community
> during their mass exodus to QOTO in the early years. Similarly, for
> their protection and at their request, is why we only silence servers
> and do not suspend them (see the post I linked above for the details
> on this).
>
> 3) harassment and other issues are also strictly enforced on our server.
>
> If you wish to discuss this further please feel free to reach out to
> me either by email or by reaching out to me at @freemo@qoto.org
> ===================
>
> In case you have trouble following the link above to the post I
> referenced I will include the text of that post below for your
> convenience.
>
> I mentioned this in a private message to someone recently about why a
> small handful of servers block qoto. I wanted to reiterate it here for
> the newcomers on QOTO who don't know the history:
>
> So there are some servers out there that demand every server in the
> network block every instance they do, and if a server doesn't block an
> instance they block then they block you in retaliation.
>
> Their reason for this is quite flawed but it goes like this.. If we
> federate with a bad actor instance and we boost one of their posts
> then their users will see it and defeat the purpose of the block. The
> problem is, this isnt how it actually works. If they block a server
> and we boost it, they wont see the boost, that's how blocks work.
>
> The issue becomes even more complicated when you consider the fact
> that these servers, by virtue of their policy, have huge block lists
> where they block tons of major servers. So in order to satisfy them we
> too would have to block a huge number of servers.
>
> This means you have a choice, you either join a server that isnt
> blocked, but has a huge block list themselves, or, you join a server
> that doesn't block and be blocked by a small handful of servers.
> Obviously that means on QOTO you will have a bigger view of the world
> than you would on any of these other servers. In fact QOTO has one of
> the largest federation footprints of any server in the network.
>
> I want to also explain why we chose the decision we did. Years ago
> when this controversy started and servers across the fediverse started
> blocking there was a divide of people taking sides. WOTO was one of
> the few servers that didnt take sides and allowed people to read
> content from any server (but with strict hate speech rules). This
> caused a huge influx of people,specifically from the LGBTQ community,
> onto our server. It turns out many people relied on us not-blocking
> for their physical safety. There were big name bigots (like milo
> yiannopoulos) who were on the network. They used their accounts here
> to watch his account for doxing so they could warn themselves and
> their community and protect themselves accordingly. In fact we added a
> feature just for them called subscriptions which allowed them to
> monitor accounts without following them so they could do so anonymously.
>
> In tthe end for the safety of the LGBTQ community here we refused to
> engage in mass server blocking and instead encouraged our users to
> block servers on an individual basis and provided access to block
> lists for them to do so. But some really misguided servers blocked us
> anyway.
>
> Thankfully the servers blocking us are few and far between and are
> limited to only the most excessive and aggressive block lists. As I
> said, QOTO has one of the largest federation footprints on the fediverse,
view raw qoto_appeal.eml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Nova Elys’ Logbook, 7 November 3308: First Hutton Run

Took the Heart of Time out to Hutton Orbital. Three jumps to get to Alpha Cen, refuelled at al-Din, and then spent an hour and a half supercruising almost a quarter light year between Rigil and Proxima. That sure tore up the Heart‘s paint, ey’re gonna need some work done.


Got my commemorative mug, availed myself of the station’s bar, and loaded up my hold with several tons of that centauri gin people like for some stars-damned reason. Then before I took the high wake highway home I did a little tourism of what few sights there are to see out by Proxima, namely Eden and the red dwarf itself.

Now I’m back at Whitson in my hab after offloading that booze, got the Heart in the shop, and ready to get some shuteye. Tomorrow I need to take the Overcoat back out to Opala to finish a salvage job, maybe this time I can actually get a bead on the signal for those samples…

Nova Elys’ logbook, 4 November 3308

An in-character entry from my Elite: Dangerous character, CMDR Nova Elys.

Took a trip out to Alpha Scuti as a bit to razz a friend about their freckles looking like Scutum. It was worth it for the data to sell to Universal Cartographics but gotdamn I probably should’ve just taken the Heart of Time instead of turning the old Sidewinder into a flying gascan; why in the hell did I do that‽

Response to You’re Wrong About’s Cancel Culture episode

Cancel Culture – You’re Wrong About (Buzzsprout)
Mike and Sarah have big feelings about an enduring debate. Digressions include “Carrie,” party planning etiquette and Whole Foods cafeterias. Sarah’s sound quality changes midway through because she moves from a McDonald’s parking lot to a Hardee’…

Originally posted on 9 June 2021 on the Community section of You’re Wrong About’s Patreon.

I really hate to post something like this, but I am… disappointed with the cancel culture episode. It is, in my view, mostly a good episode, but the repeated mentions of Natalie Wynn in a sympathetic light without mentioning what she was “cancelled” for is quite irresponsible.
Wynn repeatedly made statements in videos and on Twitter that were bigoted toward nonbinary and non-passing trans people. Some of these were apologized for before a couple months later she’d say the same kind of crap again. It finally came to a head in summer or fall of 2019 when she made a thread against the practice of asking for pronouns (in which she also said she felt like the last of the “old school transsexuals” despite her having come out in like 2017), got called out again, apologized, deactivated her Twitter for a short time before coming back and putting out a new video with a cameo from Buck Angel (who she shouted out on Twitter when announcing the video). Buck Angel is a trans man famous as a porn star and infamous as a transmedicalist or “truscum”, i.e. the view that transness is a Medical Condition™ and that anyone who doesn’t experience gender dysphoria (or experiences it in a way that isn’t True Dysphoria™) isn’t really trans. Quite a lot of nastiness and gatekeeping comes from transmeds including broad anti-nonbinary bigotry. This was the final straw for many people because no matter how many times Wynn apologizes, those apologies ring hollow when she goes right back to the same old shit. Then she made the “Cancellation” video a few months later, leading to quite a bit of dogpiling of people who criticized her thanks to screenshots included in the video (at least some of which didn’t @mention her and even had her blocked) and has made an even bigger name for herself than she ever would have gotten thanks to the cancellation narrative.

Now, I don’t expect cis people to know all of this without doing some digging, but considering this was first and foremost a trans intracommunity issue, I do think that cis allies have a responsibility to do that due diligence. Please, please be better about this in the future.

My device name theme

I started actively naming my computing devices somewhere around 2012/2013 after I started dealing with servers for the first time. The first servers I had shell access to were those belonging to a friend I met through an RP community who hosted infrastructure for said community. They introduced me to the idea of themed names for servers and other computers; they use Sonic level names. The name scheme I ended up settling on is also video game themed, which you might be able to figure out from the domain name of my Mastodon instance: locations from Pokémon.

Current local device names are Rustboro and Saffron for my phones, Oldale for my laptop, Littleroot for my older desktop, and Mossdeep for my new desktop. (Yes I have a bit of Hoenn favoritism, Ruby was the first game in the series I completed.)

October update: Rustboro, a Galaxy S4, has finally been retired. Driftveil, a Pixel 5a, has taken its place.

Queer Etymology: Enby

There’s a lot of misinformation about various LGBT/Queer terms, especially when it comes to neologisms coined on social media where the origin may not be well-documented. For this post, I’m going to address the etymology of the word ‘enby’ and the misconceptions around it.

The context of this post is that within the last few months I have become aware of discussions around the term ‘enby’ and the initialism it is derived from: NB. Due to NB being an initialism also used in discussions of race to mean non-Black, some people of color have asked that people not use the initialism to mean nonbinary. A lot of people in these discussions have made the claim that the word ‘enby’ was coined by nonbinary people of color as an alternative to the initialism. This claim is false in all respects.

This September 2013 post, originally from Tumblr user revolutionator[note] is the origin of the term

i wish there was an nb equivalent to words like boys and girls

nb

enby

enbies

‘Enby’ is literally just intended as a nonbinary equivalent to ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, and the discussion of initialism collision with ‘non-Black’ came years later as far as I can tell. And as many nonbinary people have brought up, the term can be quite infantilizing[see 2021 addendum] and should not be used for people who don’t use it for themself.

As for the other part of the false claim, that it was coined by a person of color, I’ll let this (partially redacted for privacy on a locked account) screenshot of the coiner’s Twitter profile say all that needs to be said about that:

Image for post

Note: The link is to a Wayback archive of a reblog by Tumblr user faunmoss from 6 years ago as of this writing in 2019. The original post itself is on a blog that Vector last posted to in 2015, with a large string of numbers as the current username and behind the post-2018 NSFW filter, which breaks links to direct posts outside the mobile app. Reblogging to drafts from mobile and checking the timestamp with Xkit shows the OP was posted on 10 September 2013:

Image for post

2021 Addendum: A couple years later, I’m not really happy with how I phrased this. While ‘enby’ can be infantilizing, it’s no more so than the words it was coined as an analogue of (i.e. ‘boy’ and ‘girl’).