It came to my attention that someone had posted a message saying, in effect, "Don't trust the United Federation of Instances. One of their instance admins is boosting stuff with swastikas in it. UFoI just pretending to be good faith actors!"

The accuser didn't provide receipts, but they did name the instance admin. Looking through that admin's feed, I found that, lo and behold, they HAD boosted something from the notorious poa.st. The content of the message wasn't hate speech (just an innocuous anime picture), but the username indeed had a swastika and a Confederate flag in it. In my book, that counts as hate speech.

I reported this to a UFoI admin. It turns out that the offending instance had been removed from the UFoI.

The nascent UFoI is waiting until they've vetted the initial member instances before posting an official list. Unfortunately, until this process is finished, sites can pretend to be members. (The offending instance can and does claim to be a member on their website.)

Lessons / thoughts / questions:

1. Admins can't fix problems that they don't know about. See something? Say something!

2. There are definitely bad actors (including Nazis, trolls, impostors, and DDOS attackers) in the Fediverse.

3. Someone can see bad actions and conclude -- correctly, mistakenly, or dishonestly -- that the actor's admin knows about or condones this. Before jumping to conclusions, it may be best to give the system a little time to work.

4. At the same time, marginalized people are sick and tired of playing whack-a-mole with this stuff. Saying, "If you get something you don't want to see, just block the person or instance," comes from a place of privilege: specifically, the place of not getting a firehose of this stuff every day.

5. Suppose I'm on instance A. A federates with B, and B with C, but A does not federate with C. If someone from B boosts something from C, will I (on A) see it on my federated timeline? Are there other places where I might see it?