It's Been a Weird Week

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It’s … been a week? I logged onto my GoToSocial account and was yapping like I usually am, and then I was suddenly notified that someone who added me to a nasty Bluesky blocklist over nine months ago had suddenly erected a thread on a Mastodon instance calling for my total silencing (#fediblock). Unprompted. And with 99% slander/defamation (I did respond to the thread via a bot account I had on mastodon.social, but the m/s mods erased my response in minutes), or as Parker Molloy once said about something I wrote in my earlier blogging days, “Mostly hyperbole, with grains of truth.” And then I filed reports, opened a direct message to the admin, moved to a new Mastodon instance (this was mostly unrelated), filed takedowns, and it’s just … strange.

Strange that after legitimate reports, and requests, the content still stands, nobody from the actual instance itself has made any attempt to respond, and the content is still gradually garnering notice from random strangers, and I’m left with almost no tools or recourse to say or do anything about it, while lies are just left out in the open. That’s not to say I can’t do anything about it, but it shouldn’t have been allowed to get this far.

But I’m also no stranger to being treated this way.

I’m reminded of the Twitter days, back in 2020, when I asked a synthwave artist not to refer to me as a “he/she/they,” and kind of off-the-cuff mentioned that this was a little transphobic, and it caused so much blowback that I was silenced, blocked, blacklisted, and pushed out of the music scene entirely.

To this day there has never been any justice for any of that treatment, and I’m only really now aware that I did have options. There were things I should have done, that I didn’t do, and it’s far too late for that now. But hindsight is 20/20.

One of the things I’m really tired of, though, is having to stand up for myself, by myself, every single time something like this happens. That’s not to say that other people in my miniature circle on the Fediverse didn’t back me up, or file a report … they did! And I do appreciate everything or anything that others are willing to do in my defense. But if this were pre-2019, back when I still had some semblance of a real community and support network, I wouldn’t be fighting this little battle almost entirely on my own.

What’s happened to our communities?