Been reading up on it a bit, yeah, seems to be the case indeed. Shame it went that way for them.

They thought they could covertly silence leftists and trans people. Par for the course with bigoted fascists.

I'll give a short description of the long post.

also, I have to call him not just a dumbass but a malicious dumbass.

"Someone leaked the list. Why am I on it??"

A: The list was never hidden just not advertised (lest people game it). I also could have encrypted it, but I merely compressed it for efficiency. If you're on the list, then one of the 10 reasons above applies.

the file in question was placed obscurely. updated without directly calling out what it was. and published without notifying users.

seems a lot of effort went into obfuscating the true purpose of the file.

while on the subject of obfuscation. he claimed he "compressed it for efficiency".

he compressed it, then base64 encoded it. why? why compress it to only expand the size of the file by encoding it??

@ptz@dubvee.org is a dumbass and a shitty dev if he thinks any of the bullshit he said was worth the time it took to say it.

We’re included in what the lead developer describes as “bottom of the barrel” “people rejected by civil society.”

That's fucked up. And he's the self-appointed "nice" [secret]police? Yikes.

Really? I'm malicious spammer, hate-monger or blackhat state actor? News to me, but good to know.

Though I do fear the backlash. You’ve got a bunch of malicious spammers, hate-mongers and blackhat state actors who now have an open window to cause a lot of harm (harassment & general sowing of discontent) with the convenient smoke screen of upset trans folks who it can be blamed on.

“These are all rough edges of the threadiverse which I am attempting to round off

I'm a rough edge!

You're assuming his apologia is not disingenuous. The notes he added in the commit messages and the extent to which he blocked users who were indirectly implicated in his accusations don't line up with his explanations.

There's also the fact that much of it is caught under a very broad net of "promoting violence" without any examples provided of what constitutes such a thing. He used that exact explanation to justify banning blahaj.zone, where he said that some users did so and the admins did not act on it, which prompted him to blacklist the entire instance and the admins specifically.

This isn't even getting into the intentional inaccuracies about the nature of his "Toxic Mode", or his entire rant on db0 which is not only dishonest and weirdly personal, but also straight up lying about what happened and why. There's zero way to say that exposing his blacklist is "going Karen" like he did, and it's a straight lie to say that nobody had a problem with his blacklisting until db0 complained when the situation is that db0 made the existence of the blocklist known.

The philosophy of federation is that such whims should be openly handled on the federation level, not in a secret blacklist of a front end that was openly available to all.

All of this shit falls flat when the dev themself admits they hid the feature to disable deep in the app and even called it "toxic mode". Is saying "perchance" toxic? Because that's one of their blocked phrases. Fuck no, it's not. This is just shit the personally dislike and put it in under the guise of making the fediverse more normie friendly.

As if silently hiding content with phrases like "perchance" and causing a massive drama makes the fediverse more normie friendly.

What an absolute snowflake.