Artisan Chat Status

If you're not Extremely Fedi-Online, you may not even be aware of it, but at the moment there's a pitched battle between a bunch of young trans women and a bunch of allies of a Black man (Ro, creator of The Bad Space[^1] list of potentially-bad instances).

Or so it appears. I... have some doubts.

But I don't care about the stated arguments on either side.

I care about the chaos agents who are making false-flag statements “in support” of one side, then dashing to their alts on the other side to denounce them. I care about the chaos agents who are doing password resets and dictionary attacks to make it look like the other side is trying to hack servers.

I've heard people suggest this looks like a KiwiFarms op.

I've heard people suggest this looks like a Zuckerberg op.

I've heard people suggest this looks like a Musk op.

I haven't seen any hard evidence of any of these things, but the fact that those things are all plausible, and even if none of them are true, those are all parties who are or would be cheering the events should make every last one of us pause and ask ourselves what in the world we're thinking.

So that's all I have to say: take a few calming breaths, and when someone comes up with the latest outrageous thing you should be outraged about: stop. Ask yourself who they are. If you know who they are, ask them who they got the information from. If it's something the “other side” really did, ask yourself if it was really the “other side.” If you're really sure it was, ask yourself if they were responding to something “your side” really did. And so forth.

(And then check yourself. If there wasn't a lot of racism and transmisia on fedi, this fault line wouldn't exist to be exploited. But stop gleefully helping the chaos agents who are exploiting it.)

[^1]: Disclosure: Artisan Chat has been assigned a side since we're one of the sources of the blocklist Ro has built, but otherwise we haven't really taken one. Artisan Chat's blocklist is public, and has solid, public reasons for the vast majority of the entries, and anyone who wants to can use it as a source. Oliphant and Ro and a couple other folks explicitly asked if they could use it. I said yes. I will always say yes: that's why the list is public. Beyond that, I have to admit I hadn't really looked at the Bad Space, or most of the other block lists we're used in.