Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

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.

#FediBlock ​

As a bit of context for those who are unfamiliar: "civility" is a tool of oppression. It doesn't consider whether any harm is done at all, only whether the (pretty much arbitrary) requirements of decorum and appearances are met.

In other words: it explicitly permits any harmful behaviour as long as it appears superficially polite and 'professional' enough. As long as it's plausibly deniable enough.

And it punishes those who speak out loudly or emotionally about being harmed, because that doesn't meet the standards of decorum.

It's a favourite staple of conservatives, as well as naive "reach across the aisle" centrists.

And when someone's view on moderation is all about "civility", also a pretty damn reliable signal that they *cannot* be trusted to protect vulnerable and marginalized folks.

You know, if journalists had actually paid any attention at all to what marginalized folks have been saying for years, they could've immediately spotted how sketchy Post News is by how the founder keeps going on about "civility". Alas.