i don't have the words to properly situate this within the current discourse right now but you all should be aware that the fediverse is historically an anti-trans and anti-gay space also
when mastodon first started, activitypub didn't exist yet. the fediverse was a bunch of GNU Social instances communicating over the OStatus protocol. these instances were well-established, and they did not take kindly to the popularity of Mastodon and all the new users taking over their existing, quiet culture
the existing, quiet culture, by the way, was a bunch of channer shit and blatantly anti-gay and anti-trans memes. the instance we saw most often on the federated timeline in those days was shitposter.club, a place which virtually every respectable instance now has blocked. mastodon didn't really *have* blocks back then
bad instances have always existed and every good thing about the fediverse today was hard-fought and hard-won. making it better will mean more work, fighting, and winning
i’m tired of reductive takes like “the fediverse shouldn't be bad; the fediverse should be good” which erase both the history of struggle and the actual tactics used to get us where we are now
the fediverse IS bad; get over it and get to work and maybe we can achieve something cool
addendum to this: the fediverse is living software and the affordances it provides are not static or stable. i AGREE with the take that new communities need space to figure out how to make those affordances work for them, but i think it historically has been EQUALLY important that those communities have an active hand in actually creating and promulgating those affordances. when the fedi started it didn't have post privacy settings, much less CWs. the queer masto community applied pressure and in some cases actively developed these affordances to meet our needs. if we hadn't we would not have been successful here
setl monsterpit, long live glitchsoc, etc etc
What is fair to pin on the project and the community is that they were unprepared for the influx and steeped in an individualist hacker culture where tolerance of intolerance was not considered a big problem and "just don't read it" was considered a solution. The software had no tools and the community had no roles for creating a safe environment.
Mastodon introduced proper moderation tools to Fedi, driven by the needs of queer denizens, no doubt about it.
Robek's article about Fedi 2016 is whimsical, rambly, opinionated, maybe edgy, but accurate in terms of the timeline and the factual events described at "The Second Exodus":
robekworld.com/what-is-gnu-soc…
@clacke this is a fair response; it probably wasn’t clear but my intention WASN’T to pin blame for this culture on the GNU Social software or OStatus protocol (which i actually generally respect) but more emphasize the fact that what we (or, some people) consider the “fediverse” today is a completely different set of technologies and instances compared to what it was in those days
i can say, subjectively, that the channer culture was established Enough to take issue with Mastodon and dominant (or talkative) Enough that they were most of what Mastodon seemed to be communicating with, but of course there WERE plenty of other, even older instances out there as well
the reason why i tend to write those very old instances off is because their “individualist hacker culture” mostly did not feel to me like a communal FEDIVERSE culture (but rather a bunch of individualist nodes which happened to talk to each other); this might be unfair but it seemed to me like the channer and later Mastodon instances had a sense of federated community which the predecessors did not (this may or may not be a good thing, depending on your outlook)
"My" Fediverse community was a few dozen people who had been there mostly since year one, people who to some degree were there for Free Software discourse, who interacted a lot across identi.ca, quitter.se, fragdev, loadaverage and their own small instances.
There were thousands of people who probably didn't follow this circle and maybe didn't venture outside whatever server they happened to be on. The quitter.es crowd come to mind, another Twitter emigration that came and mostly went when a particular celebrity was banned and later reinstated on Twitter.
The two 2016 migrations were more coherent and more persistent and forever changed what Fedi is.
@clacke @Lady this is a great discussion
Can I quote a couple of things from it in "Mastodon: a partial history"?
- Lady's point about the anti-gay and anti-trans memes, and shitposter.club
- Claes' point about the timing of the channer-culture and freezepeach instances, the culture, and the lack of tools and roles?
Here's the current draft, I'm in the midst of reworking the 2016 discussions to have more context on the fediverse.
You have my express permission to mention me as a source, refer to my fedi username and link to my posts.
@clacke thanks! and Everything I wite on Nexus of Privacy is CC NC-BY-SA as well (and now that I think of it I'll put that explicitly at the bottom of the post too)
And, glad it was so interesting!
@clacke @Lady I added a new section on "Mastodon and the fediverse", see what you think -- https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#mastodon-and-the-fediverse
> Prodromou is generally credited for coining the term "fediverse,"
We have been discussing this recently and two years ago and I think nobody is saying Prodromou came up with the term, it was definitely the users.
Most likely it was Marjolein Katsma in 2013, she was using the term for months before anyone else did. Before then it was more often then "identiverse", or admins and users of servers other than identi.ca itself were in a group called "feds".
People have said they saw the term already in 2011 but we haven't been able to find records.
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With respect @jdp23, when your piece says;
"clacke agrees..."
https://privacy.thenexus.today/unsafe-by-design-and-unsafe-by-default/
... I think that misrepresents what @clacke was saying about
> the timing of the channer-culture and freezepeach instances
As I read it - and experienced it - he was not agreeing that they *were* the pre-Mastodon fediverse. But rather clarifying that the OStatus/GNU social fediverse had been in regular use long before GamerGate channers arrived, after Titter started banning them in 2016.
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The 2016 influx of GamerGate channers was a big problem for us, just as much as for those who arrived in the first great Mastodon influx, later in 2016. Because of...
@jdp23
> the lack of tools and roles
... which was a consequence of 3 things;
1) Up until 2016, the network was small, and mostly used by well-behaved software freedom and decentralisation activists. Most of whom ran their own server or knew the people who did.
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2) Many genuinely believed that the toxic behaviour on DataFarms was caused by algorithmic manipulation (see The Social Dilemma), and wouldn't be a problem here, because we didn't have that
3) All the software was bleeding edge software and devs had a lot of fires to fight, just getting it to work reliably at all. The 2 Titter influxes of 2016 revealed many limitations in OStatus, and a lot of dev time was soaked up in standardising and implementing ActivityPub, so they could be solved.
(4/4)
So volunteers doing fediverse dev in 2016 were dealing with;
a) unruly mobs gatecrashing their formerly pleasant house parties
b) complicated protocol work that was essential to building new tools for improving the general human experience of the verse - and moderation in particular - but mostly invisible to the tourists
c) being dogpiled by mobs of tourists, shrieking either about how they didn't care enough about moderation, or how moderation of any kind violated their freeze peach
@strypey thanks for the feedback, I'll change it to "@clacke notes" (instead of agrees)
I also updated the "Before Mastodon: GNU Social, and the early fediverse" section https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#pre-history , which had similar language (in fact I think I cut-and-paste it from there to the other article)
Thanks for your diligence @jdp23. FWIW you're welcome to quote anything I say about the fediverse, in this thread or elsewhere, to fill in historical details.
While I'm nitpicking about those details, I will also say I appreciate all the work you are doing on improving the fediverse experience. Even though we sometimes understand the history and the problems differently, and favour different solutions. Diversity is a source of resilience.
we made this space our own through months of work and a fuckton of drama and infighting. but we did a good enough job that when mastodon took off, OUR culture was the one everybody associated it with