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Comment by trynewideas | Hacker News Reader

http://archive.today/UeWon in case it goes out sooner

Context seems related to the new Harry Potter game: https://mastodon.lol/@nathan/109836004635134601

> We're not banning people for buying a video game. Express your displeasure to them if you so wish, but that alone doesn't require our attention.

> Related, please don't post spoilers just to spite people. You can justify it to yourself however you like, but you're shouting into a crowd here. Not every HP fan knows J.K. Rowling is a piece of shit, and ruining the days of random bystanders ain't the way to go.

> It will cause problems for myself and .lol in general if it continues. Thanks.

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That reads like a lot of the users struggle with juggling things that are in conflict.

- JK Rowling is a tervert(!) and I must tell the world.

- Nobody is allowed to enjoy anything that JK Rowling is indirectly involved with.

- This will get me / my server banned from most of the world because nobody cares.

And since there's no way to compromise, they'll sort by priority and whatever is the most important wins.

It's a hard place to be in as a server admin. You can't really ban these folks or you'll be targeted next, and they are part of the community. If you let them do their thing, other servers will nuke you just to get rid of them.

Will Mastodon get shadow banning?

> and they are part of the community

Is this a community run server or it's this guy/gal's server, and through acquaintances this vocal group ended up there?

From what I could gather, he (it's okay to assume pronouns from 'Nathan', I hope) intentionally created it as "a Mastodon server friendly towards anti-fascists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, hackers, and the like", which includes them. I do think he agrees, which is why he's shutting down the server. If a bunch of people he didn't consider part of the community (e.g. rightwingers, or "trans-exclusionary radical feminists") were doing stuff that put the server at risk of being defederated, I'm sure he would've simply banned them (and would've done so much earlier, because he doesn't care for them).

That's the tricky part, if you ban people that are considered part of your community albeit 'difficult', you'll quickly lose support of the less extreme members, because you're banning people who aren't that far away from them. It affects all communities where the vast majority of members are very similar in their core values and beliefs, and those are self-reinforcing by keeping/driving out people that are too different from them.

In this specific case it wouldn't have been an issue at all if there hadn't been other servers being involved. Basically everyone on this server agrees that Harry Potter is Mein Kampf (slightly exaggerated), they would've all said that they hate the game and how JK Rowling is genociding trans kids and would've mocked the normies that don't get it, but without interacting with those normies (who are on different servers) there wouldn't have been a problem.

> From what I could gather

I found a summary thread from @jeanburgess@mastodon.lol which broadly agrees with this: https://mastodon.lol/@jeanburgess/109837309981257160 (https://archive.ph/GZtld)

Copying/pasting below for when the instance is gone and the link is unreadable. Sorry for huge.

============================

“So my [@jeanburgess] rough summary of what has gone on at mastodon.lol:

1. The instance dates back to 'early Mastodon', started by a guy known only as Nathan to create an inclusive space for queer and trans folks away from the Twitter cesspit.

2. it has always been a one-man band, with very hardline mod & #fediblock rules against Nazis, TERFs, sexual exploitation, etc., but permissive in terms of (CWed) NSFW content, is now quite popular with all kinds of geeky queers, trans & stans. And generally lovely!

3. for several months there have been tensions and politics around content moderation, as well as clear signs of admin overload and burnout, not helped by said 'one-man band' approach. But lots of good support, patreon $ etc etc and it stayed up despite huge influx of new users.

4. Fast forward to...like, yesterday? as I understand it some ppl wanted anyone posting +vely re new JKR franchise game to get booted out? There was conflict, admin felt harassed, I think it was the last straw...

5. and @nathan announced the instance will be closing in May - and no way is it being handed over to new "owners" (citing privacy concerns wrt the database of users).

6. more conflict ensued, with some posts getting pretty nasty, including going very close to calling the admin a Nazi sympathiser (!! not cool), In turn he instructed some such people to "kill [themselves]" (!! very not cool). The latest post says we "won't be hearing from him again". I'm obviously very concerned for his wellbeing. n/n, lost count sorry, The End for now. Total and quite sudden meltdown, basically. ((and hey, maybe governance, while not punk, is important actually))”

Hm. It's definitely a tricky situation, mostly because it has a very strange new kind of social dynamics. Should the admin somehow moderate those on the server who cause some problems on other servers? Well, socially the answer is yes, because we're all in this together, etc.

But like you said, it's likely a community that doesn't want to moderate itself in these topics.

The cited "terminally online" messages are very much the smoking gun for this argument, but ... where's the actual abuse that happens on other/various servers?

That's where I would draw the line. If someone says very hurtful things and use the same domain as me, I think it makes sense to try to ask them to reconsider, and if there's no positive change, then act.

The lesson here is: "give an inch and they will take a mile".

Also, "no good deed goes unpunished".

The insane people in that thread aren't kidding when they use the word "genocide". On Reddit, for example, here is someone claiming that Rowling is "actively funding the genocide of trans youth in the UK" <https://np.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/10xubmv/with_the_...>.

People like that have caused words like nazi and genocide to completely lose their meanings. When you hear someone being called nazi these days you just assume they just mean someone they don't like, same goes with genocide. Not surprised that so many people are now desensitized to real genocide and actual nazi-like regimes/dictators/countries/groups because of terminally online folk.

I was baffled to see this outrage leak into my feed. I follow some developer accounts and several tech and nature related hashtags, but people keep boosting the posts related to this story. It’s a shame, I hoped that Mastodon would offer a good place for discussion between humans, and not the Twitter-like experience.

With regards to the game itself, it is impossible to find any objective information about gameplay or performance online, and all the usual tech publications, including gaming subreddits and forums are either boycotting it or published scathing non-reviews. Any over what?! Looking at the player stats on Steam, the game is enjoying a massive popularity. I think it might be the first time a media product was too big for the outrage crowd to cancel

It is baffling, but I think this is mostly because these activists have obfuscated what this is really about: male rage at women asserting their boundaries and saying no to their female-only spaces being eradicated.

Woof, some of those comments were pretty terminally online.

"The idea that there are people out there who don't know Rowling is a tervert is ludicrous." definitely takes the cake for terminally online. It's quite revealing. The existence of someone who has not had a media diet similar to theirs, one with heavy coverage of the JK Rowling transphobia controversy, is downright inconceivable.

Yep, I'd love for these chronically people to take a poll around school kids, say, under 14.

How many of them know anything about JK Rowling's personal life beyond "I think she's blonde and she wrote the HP books"?

I think it’s actually the opposite. They are so young they will be exposed to the controversy before they know her hair color.

Sample point of 1 and everything, but regarding JK Rowling (whom I had to clarify as the author of Harry Potter), my 11yo youngling has no knowledge about her besides: "I heard that the first Harry Potter book is kind of boring, but the second one gets better." So at least amongst my 11yo's friends, JKR doesn't matter. They talk about currently published series such as Wings of Fire, Keeper of Lost Cities, Whatever After. I think they see Harry Potter as some old series that people read in the past.

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