Chad Ohman (actual name not a joke) is the mstdn.ca founder who apparently stole $280K from a community league.
Periodic self-repetition: the one constant in all volunteer/charitable/political activities that collect money is that someone will steal the money.
Short thread on this follows.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/inglewood-league-lawsuit-missing-funds-9.7136933
First of all: Chad did some kind of swatting that pretends to be a health check:
Chad was the wankerbutternoodle Mstdn.ca owner who had called the cops on me for some past political posts. It was using cop violence on POC. The cops showed up & left fast, because it was all BS. It traumatized my Mom & enraged me. The cowardly liar then denied it when I posted about it all. A bunch of white folks supported him & didn't believe me. I knew #karma would catch up with that liar, sooner or later. Now, it has. Cops will be coming after him, for a real crime. I told you all that Chad was a dirty, lying weasel. Maybe, believe me instead of the white guy, next time 🤡 https://toot.cat/@catzilla/116267551374750231 #Criminal #Fraud #Canadian #Alberta #Liar #ToldYouSo #ConMan
Second: starting a Mastodon server is an inherently suspicious activity. It's a lot of work, why would someone do it? Generally it's because they want to be a boss. I have no idea what benefit these people get other than petty tyranny and having people pay attention to their beefs, but I'm sure they are working on it. Specifically if there is any way they can on inform on people to the cops I am sure they are doing that.
That is why I'm on mastodon.social.
The news story at the top of the thread offers some clues to the self-booster/scammer lifestyle:
1) scraps of self-promotion
"Ohman had previously been interviewed by CBC News for his involvement in fundraising and the social media platform Mastodon."
2) everyone busy, helpful scammer
“The challenge that we're seeing now is that with people's lives being so busy — with kids, work — often at the end of the day, we're finding less and less people with a ton of time to give.”"
Back in the day on Mastodon, there was a whole thing about The Bad Space, a supposed effort to create a Mastodon-wide server block list. People in The Bad Space immediately accused anyone who disagreed with them as being anti-Black racists.
It was really, really obvious that the core Bad Space people were the suspect kind of Mastodon server runners and devs.
I generally try not to get involved in other people's beefs and flame wars. I generate many of my own and my own policy, learned through experience, is to just block people when it looks like they're bad. In return I don't ask people to get involved in mine.
But some people attack the core systems supporting the community.
People in general have to avoid building things that make easy homes for scammers. It's not sufficient to say "scammers are actually very rare as a % of the population" because they, like abusers, are specifically attracted to certain kinds of positions and seek them out.
Don't collect more money than the organization absolutely needs.
Don't set up power points that involve work that a helpful scammer can volunteer to do.
@richpuchalsky this is a shockingly cynical way to view it. Like holy shit I have no idea how you could possibly reach this conclusion.
I don't know what circles you frequent to give you this kind of impression, but the technically literate people I surround myself with do it as a mutual aid kind of thing most of the time. Usually out of an abundance of caution or concern about the intentions and integrity of *other* people hosting servers, such that their local community (usually and especially their immediate friends) can feel safer or more welcome. This is the primary and most immediately identifiable motivation I can find anywhere.
Beyond the fact that, though seemingly this escapes you, a lot of people find doing this hard thing of creating and managing a service for people... fun? People may surprise you.
The world can be an evil, awful place, but I think it may be worthwhile to you to analyze how the lack of benefits to hosting a mastodon server may actually lead to *more credible people* by volume than the circumstance in which there was some cynical, material advantage.
@scien
Chad fucking swatted me. Yet, most of you folks don't care about that abuse. You care more about tech shit than human trauma damages by petty fucking, abusive, lying, white men.
Check my timeline for what Chad did to me/my family & how he is still lying about that.
Be fucking really careful on who you foolishly defend online. I doubt you know much about his history of pathological lying.
@scien
Mastodon servers & instance owners are far from a monolith. I agree that we can't gauge intentions of every single instance owner since that would be more personal assumptions.
This thread had info on a specific instance & its shady owner. I've been seeing far too many tech folks defend a POS. It bothers me because of how he got away with lying about the swatting crap he pulled on me/my family & the memories are still fresh.
Intentions are not really what I'm most interested in. People can think that they have good intentions and end up doing the same bad things over and over. And when they do have good intentions, they defend the Chads of the world as if they do as well, because a criticism of Chad becomes one of them.
It's an anarchist critique to say that a certain structure offers power over others and that it attracts abusers for that reason, even if many have good intentions.
@richpuchalsky
👍There's good reason why this classic quote exists: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
@richpuchalsky @PhoenixSerenity And I would certainly agree with that critique. There are also a number of ways that this capacity can be significantly reduced on the infrastructure side.
If identities and account content were managed in a decentralized manner, on-device, the ability of instance owners would be significant reduced. If you take this far enough, they'd have almost no power. See: DeltaChat, which is a good example of a communication platform/medium that offers very little power to the instance/relay holders. They basically have none and cannot practically do much at all.
The problem I have, then, is that your understanding of hosting a mastodon instance as "inherently suspicious" is so out of sorts with the observable incentive structures at play, as I see them, as to actually weaken your critique.
@richpuchalsky @PhoenixSerenity In part the problem is that internet infrastructure has been invested in and managed in a centralized way for so long that it takes significant investment of resources and time to develop any reasonable alternative that is trustless and decentralized.
That, and for many more specific tasks the issue is just plainly more difficult to do in a decentralized manner. You end up needing to create and use CRDTs, a data archetype that is not at all a solved problem and still heavily worked on. Yet little adopted, since the incentive structure behind the economics prioritizes centralized infrastructure so that it can be held hostage for a price.
In this context there becomes little a lone or few developers can reasonably do, especially between their dayjobs. Which means it ends up for most, centralized infrastructure or no solution. No solution means surrendering the masses to predatory platforms that are full of *only* capitalistic authoritarian bastards, instead of the relatively few in contrast.
There are a million projects that people can start. I've started a lot of librarianship projects myself. They provide free information and data to people. They also don't collect information about people and there is no way for me to leverage power by starting them. Those projects are always available.
If someone starts a heavy-work power node project and doesn't make a group project with some kind of policies rather then their whims? Nope.
@richpuchalsky I genuinely don't know what else to tell you, since I have no idea where so much of your cynicism comes from. I host lots of software for local communities, clubs, I interact on the daily with mutual aid groups. I have a very active ring of friends and contacts who regularly host mastodon servers, unix servers, voip servers, for them and their friends.
It is often a thankless task, with little to be gained, as you mentioned outright. It is hilariously and ironically (given that it is, sadly, a male-dominated field) at times invisible labor. You face harassment even by your own users. It can be awful.
It is also often fun, and a mentally engaging process akin to a puzzle. You learn a lot and grow. You feel capable. When it grows, and is up and running, you feel accomplished. Perhaps you might understand it more from this angle; that it is often a kind of hobbyist drive behind a lot of it.
I certainly wouldn't go through the bs if I didn't have any fun.
But yes, there are capacities for abuse that attract some amount of, whatever you'd like to call them; narcissists, megalomaniacs, self-interested assholes. This is why I prefer relay-based, trustless(ish, it's complicated) solutions since they make that capacity almost null in most circumstances.
Part of it, though, is that there's not much to be gained for these assholes compared to other, easier, and less authoritarian-hostile spaces.
So I can't tell where you get this cynical and sweeping generalization on the motivations at large. It is certainly in direct contrast to my very personal experience of myself and others. I am also not aware of any empirical studies. So as far as I can tell, you're reasoning mostly off a limited handful of examples and your very uncharitable view of the culture of these spaces.
@richpuchalsky On the note of group policies; those are certainly most ideal, but many people often find themselves with not many other people they know with the same passion and drive to start such a project. Frequently none.
I myself host a nextcloud for several groups as its lone administrator. And not out of choice. I've been looking for someone to share the load (and also balance against my power, I dont like having unilateral control over so much.). The people I serve are not technically literate, and so dont know how to vet people for this or even why I find it so important. It's frustrating.
The problem is: coordination, collaboration? It's hard. And it's especially hard in a society that conditions people to be infantilized by tech. But it is so very very important.
However if you mix the strain of hosting the project on top of it... it becomes even more unreasonable to expect a robust group with guidelines and policies AND the solution instead of just some random person doing it in their free time as basically a hobby.
It's such a pervasive problem, the lack of material incentive but surplus of unreasonable drive, related to the software and tech community as a whole that it's a frequent meme: https://xkcd.com/2347/
People can read the article and make their own judgements. I'm not a news agency.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Scien
Ms. Que Banh
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦