Unsurprisingly given its extremely high profile as a purveyor of transphobic coverage, many mastodon instances have greeted them with a firm block. (If this confuses folks who don’t pay attention to this sort of thing, just picture in your head if it was fox news.)

It’s pretty widely known and has been an issue for a long time. It’s not terribly hard to google for.

The actual issue is, that as an instance admin who had previously been in the loop for some time with #fediblock and other channels in which admins share this kind of info, folks expected him to already have disqordia blocked.

Also, it seems from his posts elsewhere that he actually was aware and didn’t care. Ample reason to defederate from .art’s perspective. (Firefish.social has subsequently silenced but not blocked disqordia)

All of this is relatively routine, the screenshot fabrication thing more unusual.

I posted a medium-short summary elsewhere with a couple of links for folks looking for slightly more context.

I don’t think the eris or defederation things are Huge News in themselves, but if it’s true he doctored a screenshot to make the .art admin look bad, that’s not a good look for a lead deve/flagship instance admin.

.art is an influential leader in community safety/moderation standards in the fediverse; their standards for federation are moderately high, and probably higher than folks on many lemmy instances would likely agree with. But it feels like the firefish guy has possibly a pattern of not doing his homework about things in general?

Obviously the big question is, did he actually doctor screenshots and if so, WTF, man.

The iceshrimp fork actually came before the thing with .art broke and seemingly had to do with issues internal to the calckey development community. It’s hard to say for sure what the situation was because most of the stuff on both sides was pretty vaguely stated.

The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you. defederate

The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don’t have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.