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Celebs likely need to pay instances directly for their traffic they generate and the admin overhead of any Reports they get. They likely need to pay for persona

Celebs likely need to pay instances directly for their traffic they generate and the admin overhead of any Reports they get. They likely need to pay for personal instances that someone entirely controls for them. It may take a while for this knowledge to disseminate, and it is unfortunate Wil Wheaton was the early adopter that ran ahead of such knowledge. To my understanding, there were further complicating factors involved beyond just "scaling": - At the time I heard that the mastodon.cloud instance admins and moderators spoke English as a second language (it was started to primarily focus on Japanese Mastodon, to my understanding), which added an accidental language barrier to the challenge of moderating that many reports (and being able to seek out a "root cause of the griefers") - I still don't know how to make sense of the whole counter.social thing and Wil's supposed involvement there (which happened before the mastodon.cloud incident). I think it was partly a scam that accidentally honey trapped Wil with very bad timing, but he doesn't refer to it directly in his own account, only obliquely, so I don't think we know an answer for sure. (Only what I observed in federated Meta drama from a tiny instance at the time.) But to my understanding it still relates to some of the root causes of some of the grievances. (counter.social is a now entirely defederated instance with alt-Right associations and markets itself as "safe" and "secure" and "celebrity friendly" and "InfoSec focused" and is run by an admin referred to most commonly as "The Jester", seemingly somewhat in homage to/love for Batman's nemesis The Joker.) I can't imagine knowing the full facts ahead of time that Wil would have ever chosen to associate with that sort of instance on purpose, but I can understand (some) of why once accidentally associated with that sort of instance it caused some lasting grievances.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Agreed both that celebs need specifically tuned/managed instance(s), and that that knowledge will likely diffuse poorly. My understanding is that Mastodon.cloud's admin was a native German speaker. The instance was subsequently purchased by a Japanese firm. (I left during this process due both to dissatisfaction with the WW incident and lack of clarity on the transfer.) WW had nothing to do with CounterSocial AFAIU. As the link I'd provided above shows, he'd been on mastodon.cloud at the time: <https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251 https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251> That said, I'm frankly not familiar w/ CounterSocial, though it appears to be a Mastodon fork: <https://counter.social/license.html https://counter.social/license.html>
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  My understanding was (and again, I mostly have more confusion than specific answers and was mostly only observing all this as a tiny instance admin listening to other instance admins I trusted): - counter.social's admin "The Jester" was the "InfoSec expert to the stars" that was behind at least one of the post-GamerGate blocklists for the safety of celebrities that Wil had been recommending to other celebrities and because of that Wil had some sort of (para)social relationship with The Jester, at least on Twitter. - In 2017 (nearly a full year before the mastodon.cloud incident), The Jester allegedly convinced Wil to join counter.social (or deeply faked an account for him on counter.social). [1] - That @wilw@counter.social account went viral on Mastodon among instance admins because up until that point counter.social was only a weakly federated instance few were familiar with/"no one had heard of". - counter.social going viral brought a lot of scrutiny on counter.social. It was quickly found to be full of accounts of transphobes and racists and worse. - This lead to a public re-examining of The Jester's Twitter blocklists. Those blocklists were found to be themselves biased towards transphobia and subsequently celebrities were asked to disassociate with The Jester and stop using his blocklists. - Most Mastodon instance admins I trusted blocked/defederated from counter.social in the middle of these events in 2017. (For what it was worth, I made the same decision and also blocked it.) - I still don't think this association with counter.social was intentional by Wil. This part is mostly my speculation: It sounded like "InfoSec expert to the stars" The Jester had been trying to get any celebrity to take the bait to join Mastodon via his instance and it was a bit of an intentional honey pot trap from someone who had built up a "trustworthy" reputation on Twitter taking advantage of the consequences of GamerGate to build that reputation and only with hindsight seems to have been doing that "for the lols" and was pro-GamerGate while pretending to be anti-. (That era GamerGate of Twitter was a different time and wilder place. Hard to imagine people not having immediate paranoid reactions to someone calling themselves "The Jester" today, but hindsight is 20/20 and easy to armchair quarterback when not in the middle of the stress of it all.) [1] The best receipt I have found so far is mastodon.social's ancient copy of the account profile and 2017 pinned intro post: https://mastodon.social/@wilw@counter.social https://mastodon.social/@wilw@counter.social (this is also what I saw on my own instance at the time and matches what my instance still shows; I don't trust counter.social enough to see if permalinks track all the way back into that instance's own slimy history.) (ETA: Also, sadly counter.social has been in the Mastodon news again lately because new people in this massive wave of Twitter users looking for a Twitter alternative have been duped into thinking counter.social is a "safe" alternative to Twitter and not a Gab-like haven for trolls.)

dredmorbius 4y ago

Agreed both that celebs need specifically tuned/managed instance(s), and that that knowledge will likely diffuse poorly. My understanding is that Mastodon.cloud's admin was a native German speaker. The instance was subsequently purchased by a Japanese firm. (I left during this process due both to dissatisfaction with the WW incident and lack of clarity on the transfer.) WW had nothing to do with CounterSocial AFAIU. As the link I'd provided above shows, he'd been on mastodon.cloud at the time: <https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251 https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251> That said, I'm frankly not familiar w/ CounterSocial, though it appears to be a Mastodon fork: <https://counter.social/license.html https://counter.social/license.html>

WorldMaker 4y ago
My understanding was (and again, I mostly have more confusion than specific answers and was mostly only observing all this as a tiny instance admin listening to other instance admins I trusted): - counter.social's admin "The Jester" was the "InfoSec expert to the stars" that was behind at least one of the post-GamerGate blocklists for the safety of celebrities that Wil had been recommending to other celebrities and because of that Wil had some sort of (para)social relationship with The Jester, at least on Twitter. - In 2017 (nearly a full year before the mastodon.cloud incident), The Jester allegedly convinced Wil to join counter.social (or deeply faked an account for him on counter.social). [1] - That @wilw@counter.social account went viral on Mastodon among instance admins because up until that point counter.social was only a weakly federated instance few were familiar with/"no one had heard of". - counter.social going viral brought a lot of scrutiny on counter.social. It was quickly found to be full of accounts of transphobes and racists and worse. - This lead to a public re-examining of The Jester's Twitter blocklists. Those blocklists were found to be themselves biased towards transphobia and subsequently celebrities were asked to disassociate with The Jester and stop using his blocklists. - Most Mastodon instance admins I trusted blocked/defederated from counter.social in the middle of these events in 2017. (For what it was worth, I made the same decision and also blocked it.) - I still don't think this association with counter.social was intentional by Wil. This part is mostly my speculation: It sounded like "InfoSec expert to the stars" The Jester had been trying to get any celebrity to take the bait to join Mastodon via his instance and it was a bit of an intentional honey pot trap from someone who had built up a "trustworthy" reputation on Twitter taking advantage of the consequences of GamerGate to build that reputation and only with hindsight seems to have been doing that "for the lols" and was pro-GamerGate while pretending to be anti-. (That era GamerGate of Twitter was a different time and wilder place. Hard to imagine people not having immediate paranoid reactions to someone calling themselves "The Jester" today, but hindsight is 20/20 and easy to armchair quarterback when not in the middle of the stress of it all.) [1] The best receipt I have found so far is mastodon.social's ancient copy of the account profile and 2017 pinned intro post: https://mastodon.social/@wilw@counter.social https://mastodon.social/@wilw@counter.social (this is also what I saw on my own instance at the time and matches what my instance still shows; I don't trust counter.social enough to see if permalinks track all the way back into that instance's own slimy history.) (ETA: Also, sadly counter.social has been in the Mastodon news again lately because new people in this massive wave of Twitter users looking for a Twitter alternative have been duped into thinking counter.social is a "safe" alternative to Twitter and not a Gab-like haven for trolls.)