First of all: Chad did some kind of swatting that pretends to be a health check:

https://beige.party/@PhoenixSerenity/116268551857561967

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.

@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.

@richpuchalsky

@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.

@richpuchalsky

@PhoenixSerenity

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.

@scien