👋 Hey! This is for my follows from #qoto. Apparently the admin of qoto.org has been involved in a harrassment campaign, and my instance will be suspending federation with it. Unfortunately, this means our follow connections will get broken :( If you have an account on another instance, please feel free to connect through that one!
See this toot for reference:
@dragfyre Hey! Speaking as member of QOTO's admin team, I think you (or your admin who took this decision) has got the wrong end of the stick. Speaking as one of your follows from QOTO, I'll be sad to lose contact but I won't attempt to evade your instance's block by making an alt, for reasons I'll describe below.
We've been on a few widely-circulated blocklists since Gab was on the fedi since we didn't defederate from them, in accordance with our general policy of only doing so when the instance in question defeats user-level tools. Every so often, one such block list resurfaces and people come crawling out of the woodwork to accuse us of being Nazis because somebody said back in 2019 that we were Nazis since we didn't block Gab. It happened again this week, and freemo's been trying to refute a fresh wave of accusations since then.
In fact, the reason we're extremely reluctant to block servers is for exactly what you bring up in this post: it disrupts the connections between uninvolved users. Even on Spinster there were level-headed people I enjoyed interacting with before we had to block them sitewide for reasons those individuals had nothing to do with.
However, if sandwich.net decides to follow through on this threat, it's going to be up to its users - not those on QOTO - to decide if it's worth making alts or otherwise working around the admin's restriction. For us to circumvent that and defeat your admin's clearly-expressed attempt to cut contact with us would be colourably harassment, and we're already taking rather more accusations of that than are justified.
I hope things will work out, but I can't share your confidence - rarely does any instance revisit a block to remove it; defederation is usually a "life sentence". Sandwich.net already has us silenced, so outside of my followers nobody can even see my reply to you, much less engage and try to deescalate.
I hope to see you around in future, but in case not: so long and thanks for all the fish.
@khird thanks for that. I wasn't able to determine for myself exactly what's happened this time, but I do trust @jrenken 's judgement as an admin. If it really is a misunderstanding rather than a systemic issue, I'm confident things will work out.
Totally understood about the alts issue. Unfortunately qoto seems to be painted into a corner on this one. I'm sorry it can't be easier to handle.