So I reached out to admins of the few instances that block us with a polite email explaining some of the misinformation spread about us in the pastt and describing the situation in some detail in the hopes it will be resolved.
Luckily nearly all the instances are very small and its not a big deal since our federation footprint remains one of the largest int he fediverse, but I felt it was an effort worth making.
Anyway, seems the drama is already begining and even more flat out lies are getting thrown around be a few:
https://cloudisland.nz/@aurynn/109361052656757061
https://cloudisland.nz/@aurynn/109361011483467968
Luckily despite a few bad actors most of the people I contacted reached out to me in good faith and several seem to be willing to reverse the ban. Lets hope the people who actually bother to fact-check win out on this one.
@freemo seems like the potential downside is some Streisand effect where these people take your reaching out as a cue to try to get even more instances to block...
Where does she get the "one of the mods thinks that women don't deserve the right to vote?" claim from?
@freemo @gooseus not a clue. We've had a few other mods over the years, but I can't think of anyone who that could be. Best guess is Sphinx used to post in Chinese, and someone ran it through an online translator and came up with something like that? Having had to translate Chinese posts when resolving reports I can attest Google doesn't do a great job on it.