deadly sins of fediverse

this is a sort of a memoir of my fediverse experience starting from 2022. so, at the time of writing this, almost 3 years.

and a sort of a good-bye to this place. even though chances are i will still swing by on some instance afterwards (as you never really leave this gutter it seems), i highly doubt i will maintain a major presence.

you are very much welcome to disregard the whole post because you had a "good" experience here, and congratulations. not everyone is so lucky.

i am not going to talk about issues like racism (especially anti-blackness) on the fediverse or other types of bigotry that i did not experience and have no say in. but consider this paragraph as an acknowledgement that these do happen and are very much real issues on the network.

i want to start this by saying that if you think decentralization would make social media great; then you are frankly stupid. sure, you may get rid of the algorithm that often will gear people towards extremist content or absolute slop, but it will not fix the users and how people use these platforms.

you may claim that "i am the one in control of my timeline", and that's true on some other platforms as well. i can indeed block people i hate or follow people i like.
however, this will not change the fact that you cannot control the fact people will send targetted harassment at you. you cannot control the fact someone will drop a dox on you, you cannot control someone talking shit behind your back and turning your friends against you.

throughout my lifespan on fediverse, i had dozens of self-hosted instances managed by me. and regardless of the host software (mastodon, akkoma, or any misskey derivatives), none of them had adequate tools to deal with that (even though akkoma's MRF tools are quite flexible)

not even as an admin i am able to prevent harassment coming my way. instances that were either single-user or were known for not having anyone i am interested in, were obviously defederated.

the problems arised when it was happening on remote instances that were for public use and had plenty of people that i were neutral towards or had a like for. defederation wasn't the option unless i wanted to sacrifice my connections (and i did not want to do that).

you cannot decentralize your way out of harassment, misinformation, doxxing and other forms of bigotry.

and, it is frankly disgusting to me that people still think this is true; and that the fediverse is a safe haven compared to pre-musk twitter or tumblr.
because personally? i sadly didn't receive this harassment on either of the two myself. but i did on your alleged 'safe haven'.

i'm not a saint myself, and i admit i let the hostility and mental illness get the worst of me at times. but does that warrant getting harassed and isolated?

consider this a sort of early graduation from the activitypub university. with a PhD in withstanding people's bullshit and malice.

not to mention that a lot of you cannot be normal about trans men (the evergreen discourse where everyone but trans men get a say on what terms should trans men use to describe their oppression), poor people (calling mutual aid a scam or accusing people in need of scamming), and other fucking bullshit that makes me wonder when did this place turn into post-musk twitter.

to anyone who sees this and somehow still wants to keep in touch: refer to my about page for my signal and discord. use e-mail as last resort, as i check this the least amounts of time.