Some extended thoughts:

I’m truly sad to hear the discourse surrounding #mstdnca and learn of the allegations against its instance owner, Chad.

I made my fediverse home with mstdnca in Nov 2022 when there was only 1600 of us. Me and Chad connected and I became the 2nd volunteer moderator. We also became friends.

That was a pretty exciting time for the mstdnca community. A Canadian social media alternative was growing! We had prominent figures + politicians joining.. we had an organization sponsoring us. There was lot’s of promise for our growing community.

During this time, there were promises made to ensure our community could thrive and to do that we needed governance, boards, oversight. A community building project I was eager to participate in.

But it never happened. Why?

Most early adopters will note the first immediate reason was because of needing to keep up with the servers exponential growth. The “growing pains” of the instance.

Another reason I’ve read is that no one offered to help, and I’m here to say that’s not true, atleast not at the beginning.

Myself and the 2 other moderators were highly skilled in different areas, and we had a ton of other highly-skilled people willing to help. I put out a call for volunteers for different groups and committees and we had dozens of people eager to participate.

But nothing ever got off the ground.

I volunteered a total of 6 months before resigning. There was some discourse within the volunteer team, stemming what felt like a lack of leadership and direction.

Despite this, Chad became a good friend of mine—but we haven’t spoken since last year when he didn’t respond to a text I sent expressing something that was bothering me in our friendship. The community stopped feeling like home so I left and came to ottawa.place a few months ago.

While my reasons for leaving were ultimately personal, I can’t help to take note that 3.5 years later, the promise of governance, board, and oversight has still not been met and the growing pains haven’t ended.

Edit: grammar

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