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:
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: