A warning to anyone trying out the fediverse/Mastodon
There's a large cluster of people who are basically an alliance of photomatts and (if you're on Twitter) Jai orbiters who try to police the various servers to isolate people they deem to be undesirables.
They are deeply transmisogynistic and unhinged, in ways that make photomatt's recent behaviour seem downright enlightened in comparison.
A recent good summary of what's going on is posted here.
A much lengthier history of this drama (which has been going on for years) has been put up by a kindly anon here.
The fediverse isn't all like this, but you do need to watch out which server you make your account on.
General red flags to avoid:
any involvement with "The Bad Space"
mastodon.art
users who frequently post to the #FediBlock hashtag
use of automated or shared blocklists (these are for entire servers blocking other servers, not individual accounts)
reasons for blocking a server mentioning "oliphaunt" or "tier" anything
As a general rule, you will want to coordinate with your mutuals which servers you go to as much as possible, to minimize the chances that you end up on different instances and end up getting cut off from each other until at least one of you makes an alt so you're both on servers that communicate with each other. This takes a bit of trial and error but unfortunately that is the nature of a decentralized social networking system.
So all that said... I really hope staff smarten up, Matt gets put in his place by his and Tumblr's lawyers and we can all stay where we are.
