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.
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 :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
@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 :)
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