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Last week, I started receiving private messages from users warning me that my Mastodon instance, Fosstodon, had a fascist moderator. Thus, they were deciding to de-federate it and suggested I move elsewhere. I decided to wait a few days to see how this would play out.
It turns out that Fosstodon will probably close down. Both of the main owners of the instance have communicated that they are fed up with managing it and are stepping down. The crowd that was loudly asking to "cancel" Fosstodon has won, but were they right?
The story is about one Fosstodon moderator called Carrotcypher. Though there are no complaints against his behavior on the Mastodon instance itself, he has expressed personal opinions on other social networks, such as Reddit, which raised concerns. Let's check whether there indeed is reason to be worried here.
Let's start from the law that unclosets transgender children. This discussion happened two years ago: a school policy that required the students' consent to disclose their gender identity to their parents was struck down by a federal judge. According to him, the law "harms the child who needs parental guidance [...] to determine if [gender dysphoria] is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse". (I strongly disagree with this decision, but this video isn't about what I think.)
Someone in the Reddit comments asked: Regardless of whether it was a good policy, shouldn't privacy be protected by default? To which, Carrotcypher replied: as long as the DOJ prosecutes parents for the action of their children [...], psychologist believe children shouldn't be allowed to consent to drugs, sex, alcohol, etc. [...], 10% of students will experience sexual misconduct by a teacher, [then] you'll have a hard time arguing that they deserve absolute privacy from their parents.
Though, he quickly agreed that - unless there's an immediate danger - then what he was saying probably does not apply for preliminary injunctions.
There's further discussion, which I found to be quite respectful. In short, he does not believe that children have the right to a complete privacy under the current legal framework, and thus he thinks that the judge decision was justified (though he does not say it was morally correct, and mentions that "can argue to change it", which is what "honest debate is for").
Moving forward to two months ago, an article was published titled "Mahmoud Khalil is the first activist to be disappeared by Trump". One comment points out: "Disappeared? It's called Deported". To which, Carrotcypher replies with "But that doesn't fit the yellow journalism agenda so...". (If you don't know, and I didn't, yellow journalism is the usage of eye-catching headlines and sensationalized exaggerations).
Carrotcypher also seems to be a moderator for the subreddit r/privacy, along with 50 other subreddits. Whilst being a moderator, he was accused of removing an article titled "DHS removes protection of LGBTQIA+ community for targeted surveillance" multiple times, claiming first that the article had paywall, and - later - that it was "too specific to a company or single product".
In a deleted comment, the poster claims that he had been banned for "conspiracy spreading", though of course we cannot confirm.
For reference, the article was about the Department of Homeland Security removing policies that prohibited personnel from conducting intelligence activities based solely on a person's gender identity or sexual orientation. Multiple articles about the DHS have already been published in the same subreddit, but only this one seems to have been removed.
Furthermore, he has replied to "You're in a cult" to a post in the politics subreddit which asked people to vote Democrat even if they dislike both candidates, not to repeat what happened in 2000 and 2016. He made a similar comment in two other threads, with a similar contexts.
He also claimed that "the snowflake nonsense that gets reported [on Mastodon] as 'harm' these days is laughable".
Overall, I think it's clear that Carrotcypher often adopts right-wing points of view and arguments, to the point where it's probably safe to say that he indeed is a right-wing person.
I consider some of the above examples as strongly worrying: the removal of articles without clear explanations, the snowflake argument, and calling certain Democrat supporters as "part of a cult".
I also think that we should be careful with ostracizing some of his other comments. I'd be careful with equating a criticism of sensationalist journalism to supporting the deportation of activists, or claiming that he is blanketly against the earlier-mentioned school policy.
Many people are calling him an extremist or a far-right member. I'm not sure I agree yet: I do not feel like any of the opinions expressed above are extreme, only right-wing (and, in my opinion, wrong). Others have been calling him a Nazi and a Fascist: I'm extremely uncomfortable with using these terms, and I'd prefer to use them for people more fitting for the definition rather than the regular "leftists are snowflakes" and "children don't have a right to privacy" rigthwingers.
Nonetheless, my overall evaluation is that this individual is not someone I'd like to moderate my instance. I say this because I'm worried about his previous moderation mistakes (again, the removal of posts without explanations, in a way that seemed politically motivated) and his explicit downplay of "what snowflake nonsense gets reported these days".
I'm not the only one who arrived at this conclusion. A user named "lo" wrote, "Carrotcypher seems like a uniquely inappropriate person to represent your community, let alone moderate it. [...] Is this appropriate behavior for your moderator, and if it is not, is the moderator trustworthy enough to continue deciding what gets approved or removed from your instance?".
Mike, one of the two owners of Fosstodon, replied with:
You're asking for the removal of one of our moderation staff based on that moderators interaction with you and others on Reddit. Your description of that behavior seems more than a little hyperbolic, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much "meeting half way" in your demand to us. Every action taken by our moderation staff is auditable, and they can be all be reversed with the exception of post deletions. He's done that 23 times during his time as a member of our moderation staff, 22 of those removals being for non-Fosstodon accounts. [..]
To be quite frank, his opinions on CNN and Foxnews aren't particularly relevant. We have a code of conduct, and his job as a moderator is to determine if a post follows that code of conduct. It's obvious you can agree with the spirit of a post and still know it violates the instance rules. I've seen no indications that Carrotcypher is doing anything other than what we've asked him to do. We're happy with the effort that Carrotcypher has put in as a moderator at Fosstodon.
Which raises an interesting question: if someone has shown a lack of skills in moderating online communities elsewhere, but has so far done a great job at moderating yours, should you nonetheless take action and remove the moderation? Though I probably would, I'll say that I can also understand Mike's position here.
I think he's wrong still, but hey, we're all humans. All of this was four days ago.
Since then, Carrotcypher has both deleted his Reddit account (and, as such, all of his comments now appear to be from a deleted account) and Fosstodon account, making him de facto no longer a Fosstodon moderator.
Now, I sadly do have to point out that we also might have an email from Carrotcypher, though the only source for it is Lunduke, who reached out to Mike - one of the co-founders - to ask for contacts, and - according to him - contacted Carrotcypher.
Assuming that Lunduke decided to publish this email unaltered, then we get statements like:
There is some thick irony of being called a fascist because you believe in following laws while those calling you fascist stalk, harass, bully, lie, spread misinformation, and seek to silence and destroy you simply for not agreeing with their politics.
I.e., the usual unconvincing right-wing talking points. We also learn that
I don't apologize btw, I've done nothing wrong. [...] These events make me think it's a cesspool of ignorance and someplace that I shouldn't be donating my time to (No offense Fosstodon, I'm talking about all the fediverse.)
The rest of the e-mail has the same tone, and I believe you won't gain anything by reading it further.
These days, Fosstodon was also de-federated by multiple other instances, though I don't have numbers on that (nor do I know how I'd get any).
During the last two days, both founders of Fosstodon have published blog posts about what happened; we also got one from Corey, who was a Fosstodon user. This latter blog post is linked by one of the cofounders as a more reasonable take, so I'll start from that one.
Corey says:
As a supporter, I have access to a group chat with other supporters and the admin team. I asked about the rumors and reports, and received a nice thoughtful reply from the mod in question. He shared that he has a long history as a privacy advocate and FOSS and contributor, and he feels he's being unfairly characterized as a nazi for expressing certain political views. He also had very reassuring things to say about the neutrality and fairness of the fosstodon moderation process, essentially that all moderation decisions require concensus among mods and that all mods recuse themselves from any decisions where they have a vested interest. Basically, his politics have never been a factor in any of the moderation decisions there, nor could they be. Importantly, he also shared that he has stepped down as a mod and would also be deleting his account.
Overall I'm satisfied with the moderation process and neutrality on Fosstodon. When I asked about current events I received very satisfactory answers. They could probably do a better job with public communication, but I think it's important to remember that most fedi admins are volunteers and most mastodon infrastructure runs on a shoestring budget.
I want to point out here that the only public statement that we received by "the moderator in question" is the email that I read to you a few seconds ago, which is anything but "nice" and "thoughtful". Whatever convinced Corey of the goodwill of Carrotcypher, we do not have access to it.
Nonetheless, Corey says he's going to leave Fosstodon:
What to do? As a Fosstodon user, it's hard to see any future path with the instance that works in my favor. The court of public opinion has already condemned the name "Fosstodon". The picture is complete and the paint is dry for many, many people. Most will never know anything about the name other than "the instance which allowed a nazi mod". While I believe the characterization is 100% untrue and unfair, the die is cast for lots of people.
Given the tradeoffs, I have decided to leave Fosstodon and move my account and financial support to hachyderm.io. I don't feel great about this decision, and I am particularly sad to leave what I consider to be a well-run instance with good people, because of public perception.
Though I have not found this article to be particularly convincing on why we should trust Fosstodon ("I was told privately" is as good as "This was revealed to me in a dream"), this is an interesting point to stop and ask ourselves what we are trying to achieve.
If the point was to remove the moderator who we did not feel like was up to the job, we have now achieved that. Sure, there was some pushback from the founders, but he has decided to resign and delete his account by himself. Should we stop and federate back to Fosstodon, now?
If instead we demand that the Fosstodon founders publicly state that they will change the selection process for moderators and will act on such incidents more effectively in the future, I believe it's now clear that this won't happen. Is this enough to try to burn Fosstodon down to the ground? I use this figure of speech not lightly, since the public has achieved for both founders to step down now.
Let's move to their blog posts:
Here's two paragraphs from Kev:
I'm done with the drama, the constant name calling and abuse, the stress, the late nights, the whole thing. The fact of the matter is, by moving away from Fosstodon I'll have more free time, far less stress, and more money in the bank. No brainer, really.
The last point I'll make is this - the fedi is supposed to be a friendly, welcoming online space, right? But the fact is, it isn't. It's just like everywhere else online - the vocal minority are just as loud, and just as obnoxious as everywhere else.
And here's Mike instead; this is a quite lengthy excerpt, but I believe it's worthy to read it entirely:
We were hoping that by cutting off new registrations for the most part and people leaving through attrition for whatever reason they chose, Fosstodon would shrink back down to a level that was more manageable. Maybe that was naive. No, that was definitely naive, and it didn’t happen. The growth slowed, but it didn’t stop. More people still came in than were leaving. We could have cut off the invites I suppose. We didn’t. Another mistake. Another step in the process. That brings us to today. I’m sitting here and looking at the fourteen reports that haven’t been resolved. I’m looking at the 100+ messages sitting in my notifications. This is work. This is not something I love. The part of this that I loved leeched out a long time ago. I wake up in the morning, and I dread signing in to Fosstodon. To make matters worse, this is the worst kind of work. It’s not something I’m being compensated for in any way. I spend hours of time away from my friends and family. I spend my own money to keep things going. I burn my own mental health. For what?
I understand that Kev is at his limit. I am too. I’m done. Enough is enough. I do want to say that it hasn’t been all bad. Occasionally, someone will do something or say something that puts a smile on my face. Unfortunately, those times are like drops of water in the dessert. There will be far more people lining up to tell me I wrote “dessert” instead of “desert” than will have gotten the point I was trying to make.
Again, I want to reiterate that I believe that Kev and Mike did not handle this correctly and were wrong in defending Carrotcypher. It wasn't a disastrous and terrible mistake, but it was a mistake nonetheless.
That said, I believe that this uncovers a much, much deeper problem that's intrinsic to Mastodon. Though I love the concept of a federated social network, this type of structure has consequences.
Firstly, we have put an unreasonable amount of responsibility and work on too few shoulders; even worse, we have not compensated those people. Sure, they could've stepped down, but when you have a public and growing instance, it's not easy to shut it down or close it entirely to new accounts. As a result, these people (whom we collectively decided to render core maintainers of one of the largest Mastodon instances) were underpaid, overworked, and burned out.
But - even worse - they were human, they were not necessarily experts in political dynamics and how to handle them, and thus when people started asking to remove a moderator that had done nothing but help them so far, their first reaction was: ehm, no? Which quickly brought them an exaggerated amount of criticism.
Again, this is not to say they haven't done anything wrong, or that they hadn't agreed to take this much responsibility (by continuing to handle the instance). Nonetheless, I believe that we should be particularly careful in how we structure the federated open internet, as handling it is a difficult task that should be split between multiple, well-paid, skilled actors.
