(2017-04-17) Skala Mastodon Wtf Timeline

Matthew Skala: Mastodon WTF timeline

Around midnight at the start of Sunday the 16th: Gargron announces that he is silencing pawoo.net on mastodon.social; that is a less extreme form of blocking that prevents pawoo.net's public postings from appearing to mastodon.social users who haven't deliberately subscribed to them, but still allows users on social to make their own connections to users on pawoo. At the time "silencing" isn't available as an option for admins through the standard UI; he does it by manually intervening in the backend database, but quickly adds support to make it an available option through the UI for other administrators.

Monday the 17th: the terminology of "Free Speech" versus "Safe Speech" becomes popular in English-language discussions for describing the growing ideological divide on how instances ought to be run

Free speech instances are generally aligned with the Red Culture War faction (hence also with GNU Social and the older parts of the network) and safe speech instances with Blue (hence Mastodon proper). However, I think it's significant that when we had the same fight on Livejournal ten years earlier, it was the opposite way: fictional "child pornography" in the form of explicit Harry Potter fan art and therefore "free speech" was a Blue/Left/aGG/SJW thing, with the Red/Right/Gamergate/MRA side taking what we'd now call the "safe speech" position

Evening of April 23rd: some people of the "pale Blue" GNU Social faction, or on Mastodon instances aligned with darker Blue, are really upset at Gargron for accepting donations to fund Mastodon development, which now amount to a full-time salary and enable him not to have any other job, without giving them a share, though their contributions to Mastodon "development" have primarily not been on the software Mastodon but rather the "community." See next item.

Circa start of April 24th: someone writes a widely-circulated English-language commentary on Medium "mourning" the claimed fact that Mastodon has ceased to be "queer." There is no mention of Japan, nor of anything or anybody outside the boundaries of the English language. The article claims that "the queer community" is "the progenitor" of the Mastodon project, though this does not appear to refer to literal construction of the technology but to something more social in nature. It is widely ridiculed.

Mastodon 1.3 also has some changes to its privacy options which highlight the previously-existing issue that non-Mastodon software will not necessarily obey privacy instructions given by Mastodon in proprietary extensions of the protocol. Even in a purely Mastodon network, an administrator can subvert the privacy instructions.