My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama | Kev Quirk

I get the pleasure of hanging out in well moderated communities where I feel like I am doing my part. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

Let’s please not forget that some people donate time and money because it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.

Funny how some people expose their own sad world views by projecting it onto others 😅

Some people chose to do the right things because they are right, not because they benefit from them.

Some people volunteer and contribute out of their own good will for the betterment of society. Especially people who believe in FOSS which is a reasonable expectation out of someone who admins FOSStodon

I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It's easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they're basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.

You can do things because you want to make a difference. A good difference. Not everything has to have an ulterior motive.

I moderate a privacy community because they were looking for mods. I just delete spam from time to time

I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

So it wasn't about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.

Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I've seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it's harder to bring good volunteers in.

Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.

But for others, I'm sure they just enjoy having a community. Some of them might also just not care what the naysayers say.

1. One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.

For clarity's sake, the views the mod expressed were:

• Calling criticism of Mahmoud Khalil's arrest and transfer to Louisiana "yellow journalism" for using the phrase "disappeared"
• Defending the striking down of a school privacy policy that requires teachers get consent from LGBTQ+ kids before outing them to their parents
• Removing posts about surveillance of LGBTQ+ people in r/privacy for contradictory or unexplained reasons

3. The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.

Is all criticism now a "mob" just because they don't want people with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views to have the power to censor others?

4. The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn't find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.

From what I saw, the admins actually said that they were fine with keeping him on the moderation team and the mod deleted their own accounts

6. Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.

Are they? The most I saw was that people were considering leaving because other instances were going to start blocking Fosstodon

What is with the concealing and downplaying of the mod's views and then exaggerating the "outrage" of the "mob"? Yes the Fediverse can be drama-prone but most of the fanning of the flames seems to be coming from the people complaining about Fedi users genuine criticisms of the mods/admins on Fosstodon

I don't think it's unreasonable to remove mod privileges for these kinds of views if you're trying to run an inclusive space. There's supported suspicion that they've used their mod powers to censor information on minorities already, just because they haven't done it yet on this platform doesn't mean you let them lie in wait to do it. Makes me worry that Fosstodon admins don't see any issues keeping someone like that around

Would this get the same kind of backlash had the mod been kicked out for tankie views?

I don’t know if your changed your view on the issue after getting more context on carrotcypher’s histoy on Reddit but I’d like to share some of my quick thoughts

1. I don’t think it’s probably fair to characterize him as a nazi but I do think it’s fair to find some of his views objectionable

2. He let his personal politics influence his moderation decisions outside of posted community rules. It’s bad moderation when Lemmy.ml doesn’t it and it’s bad when he does it,

3. Removing him as moderator is appropriate based on number 2 moreso than number 1

4. Defederation from FOSStodon is a nuclear reaction that I don’t personally agree with but it’s a freedom that the fediverse is built on. Zealously demanding all (non-malicious) instances remain federated is a bad thing as much as zealously defederating from instances that don’t have the right politics.

I often find myself outside the “acceptable viewpoints” on the fediverse and it hasn’t really affected me other than getting a few downvotes once in a while. The fediverse isn’t actually as ideologically pure as we think it is, I think the constant tankie/liberal drama is proof of that.

So, the usual "on the Fediverse you shalln't be anything less than immaculately perfect" crap?

4. The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn't find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.

My understanding was that this mod's accounts disappeared from everywhere (including Reddit), not just Fosstodon. So, I think they deleted their accounts themselves to avoid the backlash or something.

That is what their mod was accused of having done, albeit on reddit. If Kev believes those allegations to be unfounded, he's done a poor job of expressing that.