On small mindedness and shitty Fediverse politics. Long Post.
I came across a post by sheer serendipity a few minutes ago, while looking at a user profile in a different instance.
It mentioned a hashtag that was suggested for using on reporting and recommending blocking or banning other Fediverse instances. It uses the hash "fediblock" -- and I avoided using the # in this case to not have this post added to it, unintended.
Reading thru I found mentions to various instances, and reasons people had for suggesting their banishment. Was suprised by finding a mention to a Pleroma instance where I have joined, and also a mention that "Qoto people had alts there". 😎
The poster then proceeded to criticize the Pleroma admin and even his personal project called Husky, a fork of the popular "Tusky" android mastodon client.
Husky's goal is primarily to provided support for advanced Pleroma features like Rich Text Formatting -- which Pleroma users can use in their Toots, via html tags, MarkDown or even BBcode.
While I see this as a sign of progressive thinking, and the willingness to take on a project, the author of the critical post was adamant that Husky would or could allow Gab users to use it for their own needs; which Tusky has blocked on their own client.
I have informed the admin and developer of this, and he was aware and didn't mind.
It does bother me, the small mindedness I see in such petty fediverse politics.
On small mindedness and shitty Fediverse politics. Long Post.
I never understood the psychology of trying to censor things, regardless of the public or private nature of the censorship. Its one thing to refuse to engage with content (perfectly valid and an excellent case for just ignoring or not federating with servers with it) and trying to deplatform it.
I remember the Anarchists C Cookbook (certainly something which, if you read and applied it, has a lot more destructive potential than the average troll Gab post) In censoring anything, you automatically make it desirable to have to curious people (I remember tracking down a PDF of this book with dogged resolve, even using an application to transform it to readable form on my PSP as a kid, just to have it because authorities didn't want me to, I learned something of encryption and stenography just to hide it)
Anyone who keeps trying to quash these things just ends up amplifying them by virtue of talking about them. I'm pretty sure most of these people don't really care, they just want to be seen "caring" and "doing something".
If they really cared, they'd shut the hell up about it and let these crappy sites die in silence (trolling / being an asshole becomes a lot more tedious after you are ignored) rather than providing an endless stream of curious people looking for "what they don't want you to see".
