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:

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’).