Trying to follow everything is, as always, tricky without the ability to really search for stuff on Mastodon.
- Calckey, which was a fork of Misskey, rebranded as "Firefish" (for which name choice they have been widely mocked; also there's already a software company under that name in the UK with a trademark, which could be...interesting)
- This also I think was meant to be the start of a push for more popular adoption of the platform, which has just generally led to a lot of buzz and attention
- Apparently for some days the code was hosted on a far-right git host, which the main developer says they didn't know at the time; they eventually moved it somewhere else but didn't openly address the issue until later
- Folks also noticed that the dev was boosting posts by someone with a reputation for being problematic/racist
- .art admin removed the dev from a discord channel where instance admins share safety info, and says that subsequently the dev started circulating a fabricated screenshot regarding this.
Also, that is all coming a couple of days after someone who had previously contributed to calckey forked firefish as iceshrimp (lol) citing being erased from the list of contributors I think and also saying that other folks were leaving that community because of toxicity/safety issues that weren't really elaborated on in what I saw. I don't have a link for this because it didn't happen today and you can't search for things on Mastodon. My sense at the time was that I had basically no way to evaluate the claims made on either side.
Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.