As some of you are already aware, we’re launching a new version of nnia at the address nnia.cc. This is caused by two main factors: the threats we received from Jamal (Strategist@youjo.love) and conversations I’ve been having with various people for the past half a year about the general state of map fedi.
Nnia.cc, unlike nnia.space, will be a fully private instance. Which means it will not be federated with any other currently existing instances, map and non-map alike. It will inherit approximately the same rules and regulations as the main nnia. Hopefully, some future members will create other instances that similarly defederate the rest of the fediverse, and we will be federating with each other. This is a move to combat increasingly toxic atmosphere of current fedi:
Presence of unchecked fascist rhetoric
Fedi in general has a strong fascist presence, because they similarly migrated here to avoid bans. I had hope to locate and defederate them, and I manage it most of the time, but there are things that are impossible to notice on time. Fascists do propaganda through memes, some people who engage with them assume that the purpose of the meme is ironic, but it’s not always so. There was a whole string of anime girl bot accounts that put nazi captions in the alt text, for example. And even if I defederated some people, neighboring map instances did not, and it influenced their members, who later influenced us.
Eroding of boundaries
Blocking does not federate well. You can block someone from another instance, and they still will be able to visit your profile, reply to your posts, and you’re the only one who won’t be able to see it. The same, to some degree, works for defederation. Which means many people get no penalty for being assholes if their instance admin is permissive enough. In addition to that, some instances use block bots that immediately inform their users about who blocks them, and it’s impossible to defederate these bots on Mastodon.
The combination of these factors has led to a situation where the prevailing model of communication, humor, views, are getting more and more cruel and dismissive of others’ feelings, and those who express dislike for it are mocked and bullied till they either leave or conform. This includes nonconsensual sexual jokes, insults towards others’ orientations, saying slurs (including derivatives of the n word and the r slur). These things were never a part of the Tumblr map community or the Twitter map community. It escalated and, for me personally, culminated in open threats against my site from the Newgon admin and my long term stalker and hater getting to push for her version of what she did to me.
Some of my flaws that pop out especially vividly when I work as an admin are that I’m desensitized to a lot of things – I may react fast and get rude back when people are rude to me, but I don’t really feel it till it gets to some critical amount that’s already way past tolerance levels of an average person – and I’m a clout-chaser, so I’m always very hesitant to ban/defederate and limit the engagement people give me and my site. As an admin of nnia.space, I should have banned and defederated more. And I still hope to catch up on it, after we catch up on some more changes than need to be made. But creating a new instance is a necessary move still, because I want a new space that does not have these problems to begin with. This would be closer to how I pictured nnia when we were just creating it in May 2020, because I did not yet know about federation, about who our neighbors would be.
The idea of making such an instance appeared out of a conversation with a friend who doesn’t share a portion of my views, especially in relation to contact discourse, so we hope more instances will join us to accommodate those with views closer to hers. Conditions for a new instance to federate with us:
– also defederated from the rest of the fediverse;
– a similar anti fascist (including “ironic”) policy;
– not allowing users who engaged in targeted harassment and posted bigotry in other places.
All in all, we’re wandering into uncharted waters again. There’s also now a way to donate us money for nnia (both instances). New things are coming.
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