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
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.
@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.