meta, FediBlock, long 
Well, apparently it's time to talk about QOTO again. Sigh. They've now started a "cancel culture"-themed disinformation campaign under the name of "United Federation of Instances" (https://gitlab.com/ufoi/constitution/-/tree/master).
Their claim, once you poke through all the lofty wording, is essentially that defederation is "out of control" and that's proven by them getting defederated from other instances over the behaviour of a single user that they banned.
Just one problem: that is complete bullshit. They were defederated for many reasons (some receipts attached) that had nothing to do with that users, and everything to do with their moderation policies or rather lack thereof.
A couple of weeks ago, they mass-mailed instances asking them to unblock their instance, with the same sob story. They claim that they did this by the book, "only manually contacting instances with published contact information".
The reality is that their e-mails clearly weren't appreciated by many instance admins (who had blocked them for very good reason), and that they also clearly hadn't looked at the block *reasons* on the instances which blocked them.
They were told all of this, repeatedly, by many different people (including me), through multiple different platforms. Yet they continue to claim in their UFI "proposal" that it was just about that one user, and everything was by the book.
No mention of any of these issues whatsoever. No mention of how they were effectively harassing instance admins who very clearly wanted nothing to do with them. Not even so much as a private apology.
Their "proposal" also includes some very problematic wording that I can only read as politically conservative norms of moderation (and I hopefully don't need to explain why that is bad). Again, receipts attached.
This whole thing reminds me a lot of the Libre Monde misinformation in the Matrix community. That document was likewise very formally written, and managed to convince a lot of people of things that were somewhere between misrepresented and outright false. Several years later, it continues to make the rounds, despite having been debunked over and over again.
We should be extremely careful that something similar doesn't happen here. They seem to be taking a similar "make it look official" approach to spreading misinformation, and there are entirely too many people who will happily believe anything that looks official...
If you didn't have qoto.org blocked yet, this would probably also be a good moment to consider that.
And the rest of the contributor list may also be worth a look: https://gitlab.com/ufoi/constitution/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS.md - I don't know whether the non-QOTO folks just bought into misinformation or are deliberately spreading it themselves, but either way something probably needs to be done about that.
And let's all keep an eye on where this goes, please, so that it doesn't become a long-term source of harassment.
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 "unpopular opinions voiced respectfully" has got to be a dogwhistle at this point, i've seen that exact wording in entirely too many places for it to be a coincidence
appreciate the full writeup, i had stopped paying attention after calling him a buffoon
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@starfall I haven't been able to determine whether it's malice or just your usual centrist ignorance, but they did not see a fundamental problem with "the trans debate" and frankly that's enough for me to draw a conclusion here about their views on speech.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 I elect to ignore the UFI. :P
meta, FediBlock, long 
@joepie91 that’s pretty whacky. I’d never heard of qoto before, but this definitely deserves a block.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 My first interaction with this guy was this email… https://lists.ffdn.org/wws/arc/mastodon-admin/2022-11/msg00017.html
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@RGrunblatt "Jeffrey doesn't mock pronouns in his bio, it's just a joke."
Wow.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@RGrunblatt @joepie91 oh god... Those emails are a ride. And not a fun park ride.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@RGrunblatt @joepie91 interesting how in this post it's "being an ally to the LGBT community" not "our LGBT community on our server" like in the blog post. 🤔
Sus if you ask me
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
That Thor guy with his, "Don't get your yucky human feelings all over my pristine tech" is really... something. 
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 I've added note of this to our QOTO page: https://mew.toot.cat/mw/Qoto.org
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 So they want to create a council that governs all of the fediverse and have central control? Well. They have lost their minds. My whole stick with having a single user instance is so I can go ahead and block any instance I don't want to have in my feeds. I stopped eving showing my blocklist so I don't have to deal with butthurt Admins anymore.
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@ailnoth I think it's a bit more nuanced than that - they don't seem to be vying for direct central control exactly, but rather running an influence campaign to discourage defederation.
Those motivations seem credible - from a freeze peach perspective, defederation is a thing to avoid, and to convince others not to do.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 One potential downside to running an instance: Having to become an expert on the "scene," who's being disingenuous, who's actually acting in good faith but making an inadvertent hash of it, and who's straight up trying to play everyone for suckers.
QOTO was one of my first blocks and I don't see them leaving the blocklist any time soon, though.
Θ
re: meta, FediBlock
@joepie91 this shit is just the "Fediverse-Friendly Moderation Covenant" all over again isn't it
re: meta, FediBlock
@kescher Wasn't familiar with that one but yeah, that looks to be about the size of it
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91@social.pixie.town That's a whole lot of work and effort they're putting in just to create a convenient blocklist of instances that explicitly support hate speech...
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@ada I suspect the play is to try and make defederation appear socially unacceptable, to a broader public which doesn't quite understand yet why it's a thing on here.
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@ada (That is, we're not the target demographic, the 'clueless centrists' are)
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91@social.pixie.town That may be the plan, but their first rule is explicit allowance of hate speech. That isn't going to give them much social traction
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@ada Thing is, that's obvious *to us*. But the whole "hate is banned, but critical questions are okay" is unfortunately a very effective dogwhistle to draw in naive centrists, who don't (want to) see the intentions behind "just asking questions" and such harassment tactics.
It could absolutely gain traction, when framed as the "reasonable compromise" approach. It very frequently does work in other contexts :/
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91@social.pixie.town But hate isn't banned. It's explicitly allowed as the very first rule. They aren't attempting to obfuscate it behind "just asking questions", they aren't attempting to explain it or validate it.
It's simply"Hate is fine as long as it's civil" as the opener.
What I expect to see is future drafts to tone that down, so that we get to the point you're talking about, where the tolerance of hate isn't phrased that way, but is instead obfuscated behind obtuse phrasing
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@ada Wait, are we looking at the same document? This is what I'm seeing:
"The following acts are strictly forbidden on all instances within the UFI: 1. Hate-based racism, sexism, and other hateful speech, but generally unpopular opinions voiced respectfully will be fine."
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91@social.pixie.town Ah, early morning misread from me before the coffee kicked in.
I was remember rule 1 as "Hate-based racism, sexism, and other hateful speech and generally unpopular opinions voiced respectfully will be fine"
Mea culpa
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@ada Ah yeah, I can see how that might happen :)
meta, FediBlock (additional receipts) :boost_requested:
@joepie91 lmao
re: meta, FediBlock (additional receipts)
@joepie91 good chance... in Germany especially? 
I think I will drop an email to this guy
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 First, what’s wrong with their Sixth rule? Second, the rest seems terrible. I have an account there and I guess I might have to remove it.
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@Liberonscien Specifically calling out nudity/sexuality as requiring a CW *but nothing else* is a tell-tale sign of puritan politics, and it's the root of an awful lot of oppressive shit
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 So if it also included violence then it would’ve been less sus or what?
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@Liberonscien Among other things, yes. From the highly cherrypicked rule, it is obvious that the intent here is "promoting certain social norms", and not the "giving people control over what they see" that people normally ask for CWs for. Then the rule would've been much broader.
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 Fair enough.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 qoto must understand that if people don't want to interact with them they must respect that.
I don't have to hear you if i don't want to.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 I dunno, they could only get 20 people to sign on, half of which are qoto users, and none of which (AFAICT) are server admins?
Smells like failure to me. Not that we should ignore it, but we can limit our stress levels.
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@fuzzychef It's only a very recent thing, there's at least one admin of large instances on there, and the QOTO admin seems to still be going around trying to peddle it to people.
Merely having it published and look official can be a significant risk (see eg. the Libre Monde thing), and I'm not at all certain that that list won't grow, or that it won't be propagated by some of the, shall we say... less community-aware instance admins.
So yes, it's true that the list of contributors is small right now. But this is something to nip in the bud *before* it gets big.
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@fuzzychef (I'm avoiding naming the specific admin out loud for now, as it's not clear to me how people ended up on that list exactly)
re: meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@joepie91 "generally unpopular opinions voiced respectfully" lol that's one hell of a loophole 😩
re: meta, FediBlock, long
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
@nev @joepie91 I expressed an interest in developing this, I've never claimed sauropods.win was currently ready to be included in any sorts of lists with requirements.
It is my intention for formalise things at sauropods.win, but frankly I haven't had time over the last month or so, and the very light moderation duties required haven't forced the issue.
meta, FediBlock, long :boost_requested:
He also told me that the rules they had _only_ applied to local users and they would absolutely not institute bans on users from other servers.
re: meta, FediBlock, long
@jeffalyanak Yep. He claims that this is "on request of the LGBTQ+ community on QOTO", but his stated rationale for that (so that they can monitor bad actors) doesn't hold up to scrutiny and I strongly suspect that it's a lie.
meta, FediBlock (additional receipts)
So I've been told that the QOTO admin is also planning to sue Eugen over their removal from joinmastodon.org (presumably over the toot about the reason for their removal specifically). I do not have further context to confirm the details here, but here is the receipt.