Mastodon WTF timeline (2017)
This is an interesting saga I didn&#x27;t hear anything about when it was happening. I recall seeing that Pixiv had launched an instance, but I&#x27;m honestly shocked that it took off like it did. It makes sense that it was appealing to artists in part due to a more lax policy regarding sensitive images.<p>The author would&#x27;ve done themselves a significant favor by not wasting a bunch of space on an attempt to neutrally and imprecisely classify &#x27;red&#x27; and &#x27;blue&#x27; groups before dispensing with the neutrality halfway through. The neutrality wasn&#x27;t especially helpful in the first place, but his &quot;free speech&quot; and &quot;safe speech&quot; labels later on are (from my interpretation of everything he describes in the series of events) both clearer and more neutral than any attempt to group sides together as &#x27;SJWs&#x27; or &#x27;aGG&#x27; or &#x27;MRAs&#x27; or whatever because it describes the general point of view underlying their behavior. It may not describe those groups <i>as entire individuals</i> but it seems to accurately classify most of the split here - people seeking mastodon instances that are a Safe Environment (hence the incredible threat posed by federated instances not honoring privacy settings) vs people seeking mastodon instances that are moderation-light and rules-light where they can do whatever they like. The legal threat posed to server operators by caching is an interesting side angle that puts the operators in a nasty spot.<p>It sucks that issues with fair treatment of French and Japanese speakers on Mastodon have to get sidelined by getting pulled into right-vs-left US culture wars - what Japanese artists choose to post on social media really shouldn&#x27;t have anything to do with how Americans feel about concentration camps or no-platforming. In a sense, even this attempt to depict the way Japanese users were impacted by this whole saga falls flat because it centers the western parties (&#x27;red&#x27; and &#x27;blue&#x27;) in the story despite the fact that the Japanese users featured in it outnumber them.<p>On a final note, it&#x27;s interesting to see Twitter described as Blue here, as at the present time Twitter&#x27;s company leadership is actively and openly courting the right wing in business meetings and online discussions (including &quot;alt-right&quot; leaders), presumably for business reasons but perhaps for others. I guess the political winds shift quickly.