Fosstodon Drama as a Microcosm for Culture Wars

If you haven’t heard, there’s been a bit of drama going on over at Fosstodon. I made sure to take my time and observe what was going on before I made final judgements. My take, people are jerks, we can’t have nice things, and this is a microcosm of the current political landscape. Let me explain.

Drama Drama

The Incident

Here’s my TLDR of what happened with this drama. A Fosstodon moderator, carrotcypher, was identified as a reddit moderator with very unsavory far right and anti-LGBTQ agenda on Reddit: source. This was subsequently escalated to Mike, one of the two Fosstodon admins, who defended carrotcypher as not doing any of that stuff on Fosstodon and that moderation decisions are done as a team. This got escalated across the Fediverse and that’s when droves of people left and other instances started to defederate with Fosstodon.

Please do your research and look at other people’s analysis of the situation. I found Niccolò Venerandi’s take the best to get the high level overview of the situation quickly: thelibre, YT video.

The Response

Mike and Kev have both said they are stepping down as admins. There was a bit of concern as to whether Fosstodon would shut down. Fosstodon announced that they were not shutting down and Gina was taking over as the admin. As part of that post, it was made clear that moderators on Fosstodon need to adhere to the Fosstodon COC both on and off all platforms they moderate.

The Response to the Response

What is interesting is that as Corey put it:

The court of public opinion has already condemned the name “Fosstodon”.

I started to follow Gina after she was made the admin. When I read some of the threads she’s tagged in on a regular basis, I see that most instances are already condemning Gina and by extension Fosstodon for a perceived condoning of the previous action by offering words of support to Kev and Mike. Then there’s any response not deemed strong enough is viewed as being complicit.

Take this thread.

Which references this thread.

Gina took over the instance DAYS ago. The toxic reference I think was in response to this toot where she said “@kev oh man sorry about all the garbage of the last few days. I hope you and @mike will stick around, you’ve built an amazing place.”. Even if someone does correct me an link to a toot using the word “toxic”, I think the description fits here. “Toxic” content, like triggering content, is different person-to-person and I think most of the discussion around this goes beyond basic debate. Even if that’s not a person’s intent, the volume of content around this was anxiety inducing enough to cause the admins to leave.

In Gina’s response she says “shame but I wish you the best” people take that as conceding the argument. I take it as she realized that continuing the debate would spiral and waste energy and chose to exit the conversation rather than continue in the quagmire it would produce. It’s a classic catch 22 case where addressing the comments in detail is just as damaging as doing a minimal polite response.

How This Relates to Culture Wars

Defederating from another Mastodon instance is, effectively, cancelling them. I’ve seen some people inaccurately calling it silencing speech. However, no one can do anything to actively take down the Fosstodon instance beside the admins or perhaps Masto.host which provides Fosstodon’s hosting. Fosstdon is still available on the public internet, so speech is not being silenced.

However, this is my first exposure to an organization being cancelled. Before this, being cancelled was some abstract concept which mostly applied to people who deserved to be ignored for doing truly heinous things. I didn’t think people were cancelled for honest human errors which we all make.

I WAS WRONG.

People are blocking a whole instance for a human mistake. Perceived inaction is interpreted as being complicit or supporting the previous decision. Similarly, expressing support and gratitude for the previous admins is also seen as condoning the decision at issue here. This puts into context why cancel culture is such a bad thing and how it pushes people to the extremes.

Responses Like These Makes Enemies

In these situations, you’re either one of the people in the extreme which is calling out others and rallying people to ostracize the offender, real or perceived, or you’re the offender who does not apologize for any offense, real or perceived. Being in the muddy middle just doesn’t pay off.

One of the things I have found the most confounding about cancel culture is the idea that one thing that a person did, past or present, characterizes the person forever more. Where is the allowance for apology, fixing the issue, and growing? If the apology does nothing and fixing the issue still leaves you canceled, what is the point of doing anything at all? The short answer is to retain the people/users you still have who would leave you without taking action. Then you need to do the long and difficult work of making the change.

However, there’s another response which actually allows you to do nothing and gain a supporting community: double down and embody the accusations. Switch to a supporting community and you’ll receive messages that nothing is wrong with you. This is much easier and gets you in a very vocal and supportive group. It’s doubly so easier if you’ll loose relatively few friends/acquaintances from doing nothing.

Thus, we see how responses like this radicalize people against the communities which cancel them. I have always wondered why “owning the libs” was such a strong raison d’état for policies and why so many people seem complicit in this. It just seemed illogical. Indeed it is, if you weren’t on any social media and didn’t understand the landscape. However, if you have a strong community and base of support bolstered by such attacks, you can leverage this.

Don’t Get Me Wrong

Don’t misinterpret this as never calling out a bad actors. Bad actors need to be called out and put to task; especially if there are repeated offenses. However, I think we are too quick to judge people based on only a handful of bad calls. People are human. If there’s a pattern of bad behavior do something.

All I’m saying now is that I understand and empathize with people dislike of cancel culture. Most of them who are calling the war on it are the bad actor repeat offenders. However, they have gained support from people who would otherwise ignore them, but feel blocked out due to the practice.

I’m still pro LGBTQ, antifa, and most other liberal policies. All I’m saying here is that I’ve gained a new perspective on how the toxicity of the left manifests on otherwise reasonable people on the right. I figured there was always a reason people acted in baffling ways. I have at least gained the ability to empathize and understand a group that I didn’t before. Actual racists, homophobes, etc. Fuck off.

What I’m Doing

Right now, nothing. People will defederate with Fosstodon and I just won’t interact with them. I see Gina taking action and doing the work to rebuild the admin and moderation team in the wake of the incident. Doing this stuff takes TIME, especially for volunteers doing the grunt work we take for granted.

What I consider unforgivable is if some similar moderator issue were to happen again. That would indicate that nothing was learned and that the underlying issues weren’t addressed. If this were to happen, I would do one of 1. leave the Fediverse, 2. move to a big public instance (like mastodon.social) or 3. create my own single self-hosted instance.

For the people that left in the wake of this, I understand but am sad at the lack of conviction. I saw Corey outline the pros and cons of leaving. There were essentially all cons with staying and the only con to leaving was “Residual guilt for acting based on public perception, rather than supporting people who I believe are doing the right thing”. To me this is too big of a con. I think more people need to stand based on morals. If you don’t have that, then anything is admissible.

The other thing this makes me reconsider is whether I want to be on a social media platform at all. I choose Mastodon for being libre and Fosstodon for being FOSS focused. However, I’ve noticed that as Mastodon gets more popular it seems to embody more of the trappings that I despised in Facebook/Xitter. My original intent was to talk about my FOSS project and engage in FOSS discussion with others. This has really failed to materialize, and I will be preforming my own introspection on if I want to continue using this.

At the very least, I’ve learned something from it.

UPDATE

May 4, 2025

I received a few replies from people linking me to the actual post containing the use of the word toxic. I am including it here for completeness. I do not feel that the post contradicts any argument made here and is in reference to the expectation of near instantaneous turnaround. I stated was part of the issue with the very vocal minority causing undue stress for Kevin and Mike.