Fs In Chat for Mastodon dot lol
Date of Posting 12/05/2023
A quick pre-article note: This work is based on my own experience of what happened on mastodon dot lol, and my notes and recollections of what took place at the time. My opinions and understanding of the matter may differ from yours even if you were there when it happened too. I make no claims to have done any sort of in depth investigation beyond my basic fact checking and make no claims to any sort of journalistic neutrality or impartiality. Then again, as a trans woman I don't think most actual journalists can honestly claim that either hey-oooo!
RIP Mastodon dot lol
This week marks the official end of Mastodon.lol, my first home on fediverse. It was intended to close down on the 9th of May 2023, but having experienced several outages and technical failures over the past few months, the security certificate expired a week ago and the Admin, Nathan, has given up on it altogether.
It's sad in many ways. Mastodon.lol was a very important space to me during an extremely difficult time, personally. I'd just come out of the longest relationship in my life and the only place I had to really socialise in any sense with other trans people online had just been acquired by a cryptofascist, who continues to run the place into the ground as I write this text. I decided to get myself suspended from twitter by going harder than ever on insulting transphobes and fascists, and find somewhere new to set up shop. After perusing a range of mastodon instances, having heard it was a good twitter alternative, I settled on mastodon.lol. After all, it was an explicitly anti-fascist and queer friendly instance, the exact opposite of what twitter had been for me, and stating this up front felt like a really good sign. Plus the other instance I was interested in (though now I can't remember what it was) was full, so that was that.
An online space that wasn't shit
I'll be honest, I don't have the most complete memory of my first two months there. As mentioned above, not a great time in my life. I was dealing with a lot of stuff. But being able to just spend some time around people who were...nice to me? On the internet? What was this!? I'd never been somewhere online where you could actually just be around other people and they were being friendly and kind and supportive of one another. People they didn't know, or at least not well. Just being cool with each other. It was weird!
There were rules people actually had to follow and there wasn't loads of inane nonsense and pointless drama on the timeline constantly. There were content warnings- actual warnings so people could protect themselves from content they didn't want to see, and so you could post things without worrying you'd be harming people too! There was, and it's strange to say it, almost some level of community. Something that seemed impossible to me at the time. I'd always been under the impression mastodon (or as I would come to understand, fediverse) was just a twitter knock off that didn't have one controlling entity. I assumed that the vibes would be similarly snarky, irony poisoned, performative, and punitive. Even if I'd joined an instance that insisted I was going to be fine, it was hard to get out of the schoolyard mindset that twitter impressed upon me.
As an aside, I'd set up a new tumblr account at the same time, just trying to feel out a space to settle in, and while tumblr definitely had more interesting and expressive vibes than twitter, it was still filled with clout chasing sadists and extremely niche puritan types who were just there to fuck with other users they didn't take kindly to. I was however there for Goncharov blowing up, so at least that was fun. I have not in any real sense stuck with tumblr.
Back with dot lol, I generally had a pretty good time there, and ended up meeting and associating with a group of regulars who I now interact with daily. As an unexpectedly popular instance which grew extremely quickly in the time I was on it, it was a really weird mix of people from all sorts of backgrounds who were generally just chilling out and having a fun time on the same part of the internet. I don't have to provide hyperbole about how amazing it was or make attention grabbing statements, because ultimately it was just a good chill space that was fun to be on. It wasn't the best thing in the history of the world, but it didn't need to be. I'd left "the hellsite." Social media that is able to be something other than a nightmare is a gift in itself. It was still special to us, its users.
Signs of trouble
Several times over the three month period of my residence on mastodon.lol, registrations had to be closed. This was because it was simply growing too fast and our one (yes, just the one) admin couldn't keep up with the workload. There were also the technical demands of running an instance of this scale. But after a week or two, registrations would open again, and we'd end up with several hundred to a few thousand new users before they would close again. Repeatedly, I declared that registrations should stay closed and we would be best off restricting growth to prevent it becoming unmanageable. However I was just one of many thousands of users (I was also a Patreon supporter, but all you got for that was a badge on your profile) and so my declaring something meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.
What eventually happened on Thursday the 9th February at 17:40 UTC 2023 CE, and killed mastodon.lol, is going to need some explaining, let's lay out some preliminaries first.
To start with, up until this point I'd thought Nathan had been a really good admin. He was personable, happy for people to follow and interact with him, and generally a pretty chill dude despite the obvious stress that trying to run such a massive server was placing on him. He was generally keeping up to date with everything and making sure the site was running smoothly, as far as anyone could tell. Several times people had volunteered to help him administrate the instance, but he didn't feel safe trusting anyone else with that power. A position I can understand. I don't agree with it, but I understand the reasoning behind it. Perhaps he felt like it was too risky and he was safer to just struggle to manage it alone than risk a bad actor gaining power in the server. Once you have power, even power you don't really want, it's hard to give it up.
Secondly, this was the week leading up to the release of the accursed videogame Hogwarts Legacy, a culture war centrepiece of apolitical gamer dipshits vs trans people wanting some basic fucking respect, and the media shitshow obsessed with it. Hogwarts Legacy is by all accounts a pretty middling to poor game with little redeeming value outside of being a way for people who still cling to the Harry Potter franchise to squeeze a little more nostalgia out of the dying property, and as a symbol of consumers being willing to throw money in the bin and their trans compatriots under the bus just to have shiny new thing. I won't speak any more on Hogwarts Legacy as a product here, other than to say that Professor Fig dies in all possible endings and Rookwood is the one who cursed Anne.
What I just posted there is a copypasta meme that was being circulated as a sort of online protest against the game. A viral effort to spoil the game and therefore limit the enjoyment of it by prospective players. I don't really think this is an effective protest tactic (although I do think it's quite funny), but ultimately there was a huge amount of that going around. If I'm honest online was actually kind of stressy overall around that time for us (trans people) because we were constantly hearing about this fucking game and therefore constantly hearing about 1) a franchise most of us associate with a very vocal billionaire who wants us destroyed; and 2) all the dipshit apolitical gamer bros who were desperate to claim that their insistence on buying/playing/streaming/posting about this goddamn game didn't mean they were supporting transphobia.
(perhaps this article would be a good read about this stupid fucking game: I'm Willing to Throw People Under The Bus If It means Pretending to Relive My Childhood)
It was tense. It's hard to state the extent of the ambient stress this release was causing. A lot of us felt like "please don't play game that supports horrible billionaire who wants us dead" was an exceptionally low bar that a lot of people were choosing to walk directly into while feebly claiming "allyship". The spoiler meme was possibly a way of getting a bit of our own back, resolving the tension a bit, even if it was really just spiteposting. Funny spiteposting, but I've done enough of that back on twitter to know what its like.
The Event
The confluence of Nathan's struggle to administer a constantly growing instance entirely solo, the release of this accursed videogame, and the online trend of posting spoilers as a protest culminated in a message from Nathan. I thought I'd never see his message in full again, but thankfully it's saved in the Wayback Machine, so I can post for you the full text of his fairly pedestrian message here:
"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."
So, slightly weird stuff here. Sounds like a whole bunch of unproductive reporting going on, clogging up admin work, and then a request that the users of the server kindly refrain from participating in the spoiler based spiteposting campaign. Not necessarily the most robust response but clearly an attempt at some sort of diplomacy- as admin of what I believe at the time was the 5th largest Mastodon Instance, having to negotiate with admins from other servers is actually quite important, and trying not to get defederated for your users' behaviour can be a very real concern.
Defederation means servers can't see each other any more, and is usually a response to severe troublemaking such as repeated harassment and trolling, or simply being a server that supports patently unacceptable things which are immoral or illegal. No major server wants to get defederated, and while it seems outrageous in retrospect that people were credibly threatening this, it's not impossible. Even at the time there were other servers having discussions about defederating from each other over other issues.
I assume the calls for toning down the mischief were made with this in mind, and also of reducing the workload of our - and I'll stress this again - ONE administrator on a server that, according to the snapshot I'm sourcing this statement from, had 18K active users at the time.
This request to tone down the trolling instead led to lots and lots of harassment and many more threats of defederation, and just a whole lot of unpleasantness in general. To people who thought the spoilers were a problem, Nathan hadn't been firm enough with getting people to stop misbehaving. To many participating in the protest it was interpreted as though Nathan had just thrown them under the bus in order to placate transphobes getting upset about their precious game being spoiled.
Nathan got an enormous amount of heat from several sources, many within the .lol community, but I think what is understated in many accounts is just how much of this was coming from people who did not use this server and really didn't have a huge amount of reason to be concerned if our admin was cracking down on a viral meme or not. Due to how federation works and can sometimes be a bit flaky in letting through all responses from many different interacting servers, a lot of this wasn't immediately visible but if you were to dig a bit further into some of the accounts in Nathan's replies you can see a lot of people coming from other places on Fediverse to accuse him of a whole bunch of different things, which really sound like they were mad at JK Rowling and her supporters and just wanted someone they could yell at. Someone they could justify letting out their anger onto, because he was letting them down in some way. As though he was the customer service rep for Transphobia Inc.
Unfortunately this can't be accessed through the archives, and I don't have receipts, like a lot of witness reports you'll just have to trust me on this one. People were angry in a lot of different directions, and things were getting very heated across the whole instance. Personally I was sort of on Nathan's side at the time - I could see that as Admin he was obviously overwhelmed, and struggling to manage his responsibilities and just wanted the many thousands of users of his server to please play nicely. Things would rapidly decline, but I can sympathise with the impossible situation he was in, even if it was largely his fault.
A Rapid Descent
As a fun sidebar to this, four minutes before Nathan's next major public action, my fediverse friend Yassie predicted exactly what was about to happen, as they are both unknowable and apparently incredibly powerful. They'd only left for another server a day or so earlier, somehow managing to dodge the entire situation and be able to simply look on as it happened.
Anyway, the next major announcement - in the interim Nathan had made a statement about receiving a great deal of harassment accusing him of antisemitism and transphobia for... not doing enough to defeat a wizard video game(?) - was that Nathan was done with running the server and it would be closing down, due to the events that had taken place that evening. He'd had enough and that was that.
For reference, the text of his announcement below:
"Mastodon.lol will shut down on May 9, 2023, 3 months from today. Information on how to migrate to a different server: [https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/](https://web.archive.org/web/20230209204830mp_/https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ "https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/") I'm not doing this anymore. It's not worth it. Personal attacks calling me of all people a Nazi, a TERF, an antisemite... Congrats on destroying something I cared so deeply about. I hope you're happy. One last message before anyone tries to further assassinate my character: Fuck Nazis. Fuck TERFs. J.K. Rowling can die in a fire for all I care."
Now, concurrent with this announcement, I would like to make it clear that Nathan entered full petty internet villain territory, and while I sympathise with the stress he was clearly under, his behaviour was unacceptable. Most responses to anybody commenting negatively on anything he said immediately devolved into him telling the commenters to kill themselves. This wasn't a suitable or proportionate response to the situation and it permanently soured everyone on him. There were better ways of handling this and even under great stress this is not an okay thing to be doing. This was, as they say, a dick move.
With Nathan effectively gone, that was it. Mastodon.lol was now living purely on borrowed time, with a set expiry date and everyone on the site (again, almost 20 thousand users) in need of somewhere else to set up shop on fediverse. I landed on my feet on snowdin.town along with the aformentioned Yassie who actually led a bunch of us there, but even now some users seem to have never migrated away and their accounts are simply lost in the ether of the net. I don't know if Nathan even continued doing admin or responding to reports. In a way he'd let everyone down through choosing (deliberately or not) to take on the responsibility of heading up this server and then abandoning it as soon as trouble hit. So many people had contributed, and now all that was going to be lost forever without extensive efforts at archivism. Again, a dick move.
Nathan never made another announcement until a few days ago as he was pulling the plug on the server, his last communication on the site being simply posting a gif of Roy from The IT Crowd with the caption "People, what a bunch of bastards." If the domain is still up you can go see it for yourself here. I'd say I hope Nathan has found some peace in the three months the site has been left to die, but it sounds like he hasn't. Best wishes Nathan, you were a great admin until you suddenly weren't and became kind of terrible.
There's not much else to the story. The site limped on for the remainder of its lifespan, though it faced regular outages, and a shrinking userbase. There were still users posting there right up until the end. Another internet site - another online community - destroyed by online drama and harassment and petty intergroup violence. All over a fucking videogame. I'll be honest, I was really upset over this. There was no need for it to happen and it accomplished absolutely nothing. The entire protest was supposed to be about somehow disrupting the launch of Hogwarts Legacy, and all that happened here was that a queer friendly online space got shut down by a load of online "activists" who decided to show up and harass the fuck out of the site admin and owner, because his behaviour wasn't up to their impossible standards. Was this helpful or useful to us as trans people? Did this do anything to combat the antisemitic tropes Rowling has baked into her work? Does this impact the performance of some shit videogame in any way? No, it just disrupted a space loads of us were using and forced us all to do a bunch of work to relocate. I still haven't reconnected with some of the people I spoke with on there. Gone forever now. Thanks!
This week I deleted dozens of followers and followed accounts that started on mastodon dot lol and never migrated to another server. For many people mastodon.lol was their first venture into the fediverse. They were fresh getting away from twitter and wanted a new start, in a place with that wasn't like that. When this happened, it put some of them off the whole idea- the potential fragility of this as a social media space. It was too much trouble to stick with. Never mind the fact that this stuff happens on the birdsite on a weekly, even daily basis (every day there the one objective is to NEVER become the main character of twitter), it never brings down the entire site. They can consume the drama as entertainment and remain disconnected from it because it doesn't reverberate throughout the entire network for most of them.
Could this have been avoided?
Yes.
Well, almost certainly anyway. In the first place there were plenty of warning signs about the unsustainable growth of the server. Having to repeatedly close registrations but then never implementing any changes to the management structure before reopening them is a blatant red flag. A smaller server means less admin- the server I'm on now is tiny, and still has two admins! Alternately, find someone you can actually trust to help you run the server if it's become unmanageable. This wasn't even a business, this was a personal project for Nathan - constant growth was entirely unnecessary! I signed up for an alt as a backup for my main account recently, and most of the cool spaces I looked at joining were closed. Even the biggest server, mastodon.social, had to close registrations for security reasons recently. There was no good reason for the server to be allowed to grow out of control like it did.
Secondly, a more robust or less "in-between" response to the trolling problem. Nathan could have just said nothing and waited for this all to blow over. Alternately, he could have made a less diplomatic statement that would have pissed some people off but at least not allowed anyone to paint him as giving any sort of cover to transphobes. Personally if I were responsible for the server I'd have made a statement similar to what I've explained above - "I don't think the spoiler campaign is going to help but also I do not care enough to stop it. If you want to escape spoilers to this game you have plenty of filters in mastodon's settings to help you do that. Also if you're supporting this game, fuck you, feel free to leave my server." You know, something like that. Obviously me and Nathan are not in comparable positions- I still think a stronger statement would have been fine. As for worries about defederation, this was the 5th largest mastodon instance at the time. If people want to defederate over something as silly spoilers to a shit game for twats than that's on them to figure out really isn't it? They would surely lose more from defederation than dot lol. Sometimes when you have all this weight behind you... you can just...use it? I'm not saying that's fair or good, I'm just trying to demonstrate how this might work from a power politics perspective. I don't think his position was as vulnerable as was presented.
Thirdly, while not the most *responsible* thing for Nathan to do as a server admin, he could have just logged off, or silenced the servers from which a whole bunch of people were showing up to harass him. It wasn't even three hours between his request for users to behave themselves and his declaration that the show was over and the server was closing. If you are managing a server solo of any sort of scale, you have to plan for this sort of bullshit to happen sooner or later. You need to plan ahead ways of weathering that.
Ultimately, I think the fact that Nathan was the sole admin on dot lol is really the critical point of weakness here. Any problems Nathan faced in his life could affect the running of the server, and that is just the reality of having one person be responsible for service actively used by a large number of people. It didn't have to be a spontaneous harassment campaign. Nathan could have gotten sick, or suffered an accident, or had some sort of personal crisis, or just had a problem with his bank account- any of these things would filter down to the userbase of the server because all that responsibility was centralised in one person. A single point of failure, a single-headed structure, creates an extreme level of fragility. And in this case, that meant it took less than three hours of bullshit internet drama killed the whole thing.
Incoming Rant
I regrettably don't have an immediate solution for the problem of "don't harass people on the internet you fucking dickheads, you fake activist dipshit, you self righteous spite merchant, fucking log off, stop hurting people and claiming it makes you a brave internet hero because you decided someone else had the wrong opinion. Is your heart truly so poisoned by online spite and terminal posting culture, have the brainworms truly consumed you so thoroughly, that you can no longer determine friend from foe?" Maybe if you're someone who finds yourself doing this, just stop for a minute and really think about what you're actually doing. I'm sure for some it's tempting to claim this is a result of "cancel culture" but that's massively reductive. Nathan didn't get "cancelled". Loads of people got mad at him simultaneously over some very stupid shit which never should have escalated the way it did. Within hours the situation exploded, and in the end some extremely smug bastards from other servers sat gloating that our space had been ruined, and declared that all eighteen thousand of us deserved it. Again, thanks so much for that, you really made everyone else in the trans community feel so much safer when you shattered one of our online community spaces. Thank. You.
If you think I'm being harsh to the people who did this, I do not care. I could blame all this on Nathan and as outlined above most of this *was* his fault, but that doesn't excuse the assholes who pushed him to breaking point. What is written here is vastly toned down from what I wrote of them at the time. They took something we were all using and which was honestly having no impact on them, and they smashed it to pieces because they didn't like the look of it. They can get fucked.
The end of an era
So ends my story about the death of Mastodon dot lol. It was an internet website. It was a social media platform. It was a place where I found more online community than anywhere else in my previous 20 years on the internet. It was a place where German and Italian men would post uncensored dick pics in the local feed on a regular basis, not seeming to realise what content warnings were for. It was a place where we enjoyed John Mastodon jokes. It was the only online record of FIRE SEASON. It was the most queer-friendly space I was ever in until my subsequent move to snowdin. My life is genuinely better for having spent time there. It was fun while it lasted, for the most part. RIP Mastodon dot lol
