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

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.)