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 @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.
