so, What The Fuck Happened?

someone on myasstodon made a shitpost about human sacrifice of smurfs, because the aztecs would sometimes paint those about to be sacrificed blue. this was to raise the mood after they made a series of very informative posts about the indigenous peoples of mexico, and how this was a moment of great cultural significance, is not something that we should remember those indigenous peoples for human sacrifice alone.

this turned into a bunch of white people clutching their pearls gasping about how dare anyone mention such barbaric behavior.

(never mind that western society also doesn't have exactly a great track record re: respecting the rights of other human people and using them as, uhhhh, sacrifices for various goals.)

(also never mind how those entire group of societies end up just getting remembered for "omg omg human sacrifice omg omg omg omg" despite doing a lot of other cool shit, and their modern descendants and those still in those societies often have that used as an excuse to strip them of their identity because clearly to have any of it continue or be remembered accurately would be dangerous)

so this is why a lot of the "cool white shitposters club" like CJ and so-on fled to twitter after declaring mastodon to be too full of mean people. this is also why they end up rebuffed so hard when they try to sneak back on to mastodon, because.... well, this was the kerfuffle that made them pick up and leave for twitter after declaring mastodon too toxic.

it was not taken well for them to say that everyone has to block myasstodon because they are a bunch of sCaRy sAvAgEs. like honest to god you could put some posts and set them to that one song from the disney pocahontas movie. you know the one that's still fucking awful for innumerable reasons? that one, yes. you remember that villain song? how even the awful disney film decided to make the villain so cartoonishly evil as he started ranting about savages? yeah it was literally that shit.

this eventually led to the end of cryptids.online because the admin sided with those fleeing to twitter because he didn't understand why it was a bad idea to talk about the poc instance as being full of sAvAgEs and having 'brain worms' because clearly they must be less-than-human somehow. he could not understand how this was a bad look and why people were upset.

his full-on "low budget supervillain rant" also spawned the "a mere morsel" shitpost format. he literally started a post with "If you only knew a mere morsel of my contempt...", which sure is SOMETHING, huh, AIN'T IT.

this is, again, the whole thing that CJ and that ilk left mastodon over. they also like to whine that everyone is being too harsh on them for... you know, painting an entire group of cultures as subhuman savages that have to be exterminated, and saying this because they took a joke about smurfs as endorsement for the practice of human sacrifice. and occasionally they cry about how mastodon is very unfair because nobody has sat down and explained to them why targeting the entire latine instance over this while calling them subhuman savages is a bad idea.

(spoiler alert, people did actually attempt to explain this, multiple times, and got steadfastly ignored.)

so. there you have it. the smurf human sacrifice incident.

MASTODON DOT COM EVERYBODY /jazzhands

so, there used to be a member of witches.live who was.... how can i say this in way that is both polite and politically correct.... ...........a fuckface. let's go with that.

anyway, Fuckface's deal was that she (apparently????) earnestly believed she was married to the spirit of king charles the second of spain. you know, the one who was so notably inbred that he was a medical mystery? that fuck. had a body pillow of him, talked about having astral babies with him in the spirit plane and whatnot.

Fuckface also was utterly convinced that this made her an arbiter of keeping the purity of spanish blood. (again. charles the second.) because of this, she had a lovely habit of, whenever someone non-white crossed her path, dumping a bunch of extremely racist insults at them. needless to say, myasstodon - the at-that-time primarily latino and chicano instance (as they had not yet opened up to more general all PoC) - was a favourite subject of these insults, because she was obsessed with blood purity and in love with a dead spanish king inbred up to hell and back.

so one user screenshotted this screed and passed it around as a warning to others, because nobody really wants to deal with that nastygram just dumped on them. it's the sort of thing one very fucking sensibly wants a heads-up about, because, again, racist screeds that make Draco Malfoy look like a pinnacle of tasteful restraint and he was the badly written cartoonishly evil fuck in a book series for children.

anna, head mod of witches.live, not only decided to sit on mod reports about Fuckface... but anna came out swinging in Fuckface's defense.

anna decided to frame the entire issue as big scary meanies doing the terrible evil of SCREENSHOT DUNKING, which is clearly not only just as bad as the whole racist screeds of abuse and slurs, but actually.... worse!

somehow???

this then predictably made the problem fucking worse. anna of witches.live wrung her hands and whined about everyone being so mean and how she could not understand why everyone was upset. she also said that she was well aware of Fuckface being a fuckface, but she had not muted/banned/etc. the user because "Fuckface is clearly struggling with mental illness and to do anything to Fuckface would just be too mean!". especially because Fuckface was claiming needing to do this because she had an astral miscarriage of the astral babies. ( ​ , etc)

i believe this is the point at which anna declared that this was just myasstodon (again. latine instance. getting most of the heat for not being of Pure Spanish Blood.) looking for someone to hurt to get social capitol, except she decided to phrase this as myasstodon wanting a

wait for it

"clout pinata".

so we're about five layers into this eight layer dip of specifically pissing on hispanic and latine peoples. anna cannot figure out how to dig upwards.

it was at this point also that anna said her initial response was because her dog woke her up. therefore, she wasn't being racist. (she wouldn't back down from screenshot dunking being worse, but it wasn't racist, because she had to get up at 3am to let her dog out.) we are still not sure how your dog needing to pee at 3am makes you racist in the way where you need to defend someone's screeds of racist abuse and decide the mean PoC are actually worse for 'screenshot dunking'.

top scientists are working on this question but it may never be known to mankind.

the last time witches.live had a big racist blow-up, anna had pleaded with a PoC to help her moderate and help teach her. said mod (who also had an alt on myasstodon, was part of the specific culture under attack, etc) threw their hands up and decided to just fucking quit.

anna had been playing the situation desperately trying to make herself the victim - just a poor innocent who doesn't know what she did was wrong, because whoever could know that things like "ignore the user screaming racist abuse at passersby" is bad unless someone explains it to anna specifically?!?! ....yeah, it turns out said mod had been explaining to anna specifically, multiple times, over and over again, about how these various issues are fucked. and this was about round fifteen of anna smiling and nodding and saying that she totally understands how the racist thing of racist, but then doing the racist thing, and then sobbing about how everyone is upset with her for a thing she couldn't have known.

so the moderator brought on to witches.live to deal with the racism, after being ignored repeatedly, decided "for god's sake fuck this shit" and quit. because that's more or less the only sane option.

..............then anna cried about not having anyone to explain these things for her, of course.

(CONTINUED IN PART TWO, OH GOD THERE'S MULTIPLE PARTS NOW)

anna still argues that everyone was being way too hard on Fuckface, and that we all should be nice to someone struggling for mental illness. because the "screenshot dunking" was clearly the bigger sin.

there was never any apology really offered to myasstodon users for this. anna just decided that she made a vague effort and now myasstodon is at fault for not accepting her apology.

so it's myasstodon's fault. I'm Sure You See The Pattern Here.

witches.live users also accused myasstodon as being full of "white cishet men on an evangelical christian instance", because clearly, the REAL oppression here is against the witches.

this is something pretty easily disproven in... maybe one click and 15 seconds if we're being generous. or just the idea that maybe the evangelical christian instance wouldn't be named after a butt joke. but witches.live users were so convinced and in love with their narrative of being the persecuted witches, that they decided to say all of myasstodon was now white, male, cis, hetero, and christian. literal references to witches being burned were tossed about.

while in almost the same breath, myasstodon was being characterized as an instance of shitposters who can never take anything seriously, and were merely looking for a "clout pinata" to virtue signal their wokeness.

and again.

all this.

because Fuckface believes that she is married to King Charles the Second on the astral plane, and that means she should be allowed to shout slurs at people for not being "pure-blooded", and anna of witches.live says this is fine and good actually (and anyone warning about this behavior is actually worse than the original behavior because that's toxic twitter behavior).

there was actual confirmation that the body pillow of king charles the second exists, as well. a real body pillow that apparently is well loved.

we all kinda hope it's still a bit, i think, but evidence maybe not so good for that.

(anna still thinks she did nothing wrong in handling this, of course - she only reacted badly because of her dog waking her up to pee! - and this is why some people still advocate for all of myasstodon to be blocked on an instance level.)

MASTODON DOT COM, EVERYBODY!!!!! /jazz hands /tosses some king charles the second memes up in the air

as a postscript to this, i realize i've left out a lot of specific names. this isn't me trying to consciously write people out of the incident. it is because i am but a simple bitch with a brain made of cottage cheese and failure.

it ended up working out so that the people victimized by the behavior are spoken about in generalities and i left it that way because it means they can opt in to being named specifically, which is going to be useful if someone comes along wanting to argue. so... happy little accidents i guess??? 

so this is me just summarizing. i don't particularly wish to re-open this can of worms; i'm not looking to have people argue with me. this is a reference post.

so!

this all kicked off when Dankwraith, admin of monads.online, received a report for a joke. the reports are anonymized when they are sent to users outside of the original instance. he made the assumption that the report - accusing two jewish users joking with each other of antisemitism - was not made in good faith, and responded by posting a screenshot of the report and a somewhat rude rebuttal of it. jewish users getting accused of antisemitism and PoC users getting accused of racism for existing often generate bad faith reports.

i'm not going to legislate whether the joke itself was antisemitic or not. i'm not jewish. however, instead of taking it as "that's additional information, i understand now" or even just going "that was rude, i don't like this dude" and blocking, snouts online user Shel decided to write many, many words about how this was objectionable. the response was claimed to be screenshot dunking, for instance. (realistically, i am not sure how else an anonymous report should be responded to.) this became accusations of Dankwraith being antisemitic, caring only about his own users, et cetera. https://snouts.online/@shel/104990989567669019 https://snouts.online/@shel/104990740914947748

during this, snouts user Shel also invoked Mint, an elekk user who left due to longstanding issues on the wider fediverse. this is something that actually caused Mint to temporarily come back to mastodon, citing specifically how other people have been using his name like a weapon and this was one of the very things he warned people not to do. https://elekk.xyz/@ghostofmint/104995467290132341 (yet Shel was also using "this is why Mint left", while also brushing over the previous incidents of racism that had shaken up the snouts.online community.) this was later deleted, Shel saying that they didn't know Mint requested this in Mint's blog post that they linked. https://snouts.online/@shel/104994797968085269

the rhetoric around this notably caused some hurt to the jewish users of monads.online - https://monads.online/@ancient_domains_of_word/104993986890921497 , https://monads.online/@ancient_domains_of_word/104994708973868140

here is Dankwraith's statement on his actions. https://monads.online/@dankwraith/104991933682860387

another snouts.online user leapt to the defense of Shel around the initial incident. DemoWeasel, a former snouts.online moderator, decided to respond to this by calling all of monads.online "cumbrains" - an alt-right dogwhistle https://elekk.xyz/@wigglytuffitout/104995338059354215 , see screenshot. he also replied to magicalmilly of elekk, a moderator here who is a PoC, with a meme referencing the alt-right pepe the frog memes. he has since deleted this reply, saying that he did not know this was an alt-right meme.

references to earlier incidents on snouts.online by this point are rife, including an incident where a defense of blackface sat in the moderator queue, and an incident where a bit account was banned. (those are, uh, more complicated than just this writeup's scope.)

users on snouts.online were calling now for defederation with monads.online, citing this incident of "screenshot dunking" (the reply to the report).

meanwhile, other instances were reaching a breaking point with dealing with snouts.online. as summarized here under 'why did this not just get reported', the earlier incidents had created a pattern of inaction and silence. people also did not trust the partner of the admin and a former moderator to be properly scrutinized if reported. https://monads.online/@ancient_domains_of_word/105001426193553873

this kerfuffle has since grown to now twitter as well. torideer, former mod, took some subtoots that were not about him, made the assumption that they were, and decided "screenshot dunks" were the only answer. unlike the answer to the admin report on monads, no identifying information was redacted. similarly, morgan had already blocked snouts.online personally, so the ability to even see the post is pretty solid block evading. https://twitter.com/DeerTori/status/1314033244526964736?s=20

some notable snouts.online users such as hyperlink, while posting on mastodon how they do not support screenshot dunking and think snouts.online has some work needing to be done, still hopped on twitter to like torideer's screenshot blasting posts. https://redroo.ml/@witchy/104997084839564833

in attacking monads.online users and their supporters, snouts.online users also characterized their opposition as:

  • "cumbrains" (discussed previously)
  • all white and all cis (monads.online is overwhelmingly queer and non-white; this argument was brought out saying that snouts.online was queer culture and any attacks on snouts.online were homophobic)
  • tech bros
  • people ruining the fediverse
  • people gentrifying the fediverse

https://monads.online/@dankwraith/105000208935589323 is another recap from Dankwraith of what he spotted.

older incidents are now being dragged to the forefront again and wounds being re-opened. i think everyone is quite tired of all this shit.

but here is, to the best of my ability, a recap of what i know happened, for people who are confused and waking up to everything on fire.

​ 🔥 🔥

hey guess who just realized she forgot to, like, tag any of this shit so that other people can find it easily in the future, thus completely nullifying the entire point of these posts??? me! it was me.

i am putting the tags #harpsummarizes and #harptellsmastolore on this now, may god keep us and preserve we poor sinners from the astral babies amen.

@wigglytuffitout I want to print this thread out for safekeeping. great stuff
@wigglytuffitout This was really helpful. Thank you for explaining it!
@wigglytuffitout Harp, bless you for putting this together and hopefully with a decent record of some of the intercommunity drama we can all (wiggly) tough it out.
@wigglytuffitout me reading this cw
@FirstProgenitor listen i'm going to blame that specific turn of phrase on the old fandom wank days of Snapes On An (Astral) Plane. it was just too easy. it was right there
@wigglytuffitout this is the first time i've ever seen a post that actually says what *happened* with the astral babies person and anna's response, thank you
@wigglytuffitout thanks, I really needed this explained