david wolfpaw • 1 Aug 2025 • Reading time: 8 minsI’m using my personal newsletter as a little rant space this week for folks who at least have chosen to sign up to receive it. Which presumably means you won’t suggest that I forced it into your feed without your consent. If not, reminder that unsubscribe links are in the header and footer of each email. All that to say, I don’t try to force myself onto others.
But for some reason, the idea of federated systems like Mastodon and other fediverse blogging platforms allows people to choose what things do and don’t get the treatment of decentralization.
Some people believe that federation is only pure if the decision is left up to each individual user. A host server cannot block other users and servers on behalf of their users, otherwise that’s not federation. I do not believe this at all, as it is the kind of Free Speech Absolutism that comes from Alt-Right folks who really mean, “you shouldn’t have the right to not be made to listen to me”. This isn’t something that the circles that I run in argue about. much.
But what if you make a decision like that but the decision is made toward servers and users that not everyone else that you know agrees is “bad”, whatever that is? Well, even though the system is decentralized between federated servers, and ostensibly decisions made by Server A regarding Server B should have no bearing on Server C, this is a huge point of contention for a lot of people.
This is where a lot of my issues with the fediverse come from. There are folks who hate me/my instance on the fediverse for various reasons, but I still agree with them on this opinion that they’ve posted in the past: no instance owes no other instance any explanation for any moderation decision that has been made. Any attempt to argue against that idea is someone putting their personal opinion into the idea of what a federated platform should do/be. This doesn’t mean that their opinion is wrong, but it is an attempt to ascribe personal values onto a third party.
The reason that this has been bugging me this week after eight years of dealing with some really heinous things and meaningless fights is me making the mistake of publicly posting a moderation decision, which is something that had been suggested as desired per the Moderation Transparency Survey conducted this January. The decision itself wasn’t contested, outside of the types of harmful disinformation promoters with platforms who already have an axe to grind. It was the posting of the decision that caused the backlash.
Normally this would blow over easily, but this time I earned the ire of some of my friends, thanks to my reaction to an anonymous account that it turns out was not very anonymous in that circle. To put it plainly, the response that I got made me feel very alone, untethered, and rather hurt with some of the allegations thrown around.
I still strongly disagree with the reactions that I got, and the logical fallacies used in those reactions. But something that I’ve learned very much the hard way, and have to always relearn, is that many people will be perfectly fine with imperfections in communication when it serves their interests.
I don’t know what to do. I do know that I’ll likely switch my focus to Bluesky more, as I’ve been intending on doing for a while. I don’t want to lose out the ability to share projects that I’m working on publicly, especially when it’s free internet things that I just want to share to educate and provide joy. It’s been hard for me to make that move since I already was well established on Mastodon, having it be one of the few platforms that I’d describe myself as an early adopter of.
Next week will be more merch and art updates, lots of fluffy love and cuteness. But for now I’m thankful for the opportunity to vent a bit.
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Pelton said Smithsonian officials told them they covered it up because they were “afraid that somebody was going to walk by and see ‘Free Palestine’ on our mural and get mad and hurt us. And I’m like, ‘maybe we are not the problem in that situation.’”
Yeah, that does sound… kinda obvious. How dare teenagers not pretend that everything is normal and that we need to silence ourselves to make people who hate us feel comfortable.
Why this is being entertained in any way whatsoever is what is the most chilling here.
Hey, are you attending a fan convention? Tell me again how, “uwu, no politics in my fandom space” works.
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The AI is made to appease you. If you present an idea to it, it will assume that the idea is good and should be completed.
It will certainly change language, but it will undoubtedly grow it as well
You hold people to account, and it’ll never happen again, right? Right?
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You cannot unconditionally cover an industry that you rely on to keep you employed. Or that pays you to write.
And this is exactly what the people destroying it want.
Art has always been a commodity in some way or another. Like everything else, we’re just accelerating that commoditization.
The fact that something is really dumb and heinous doesn’t stop it from having an outsized influence. In fact that probably helps.
If you made it this far, why not share this newsletter with a friend? Or share with me some of the things that you found that you liked this week. Either way, I’m thrilled!