Pawb.Social Administrative Actions

After reviewing a report regarding the personal account of the admin of tenforward.social, and discussing with other fediverse admins, we're deciding to suspend the admin and limit tenforward.social until this blows over. I'll explain why on both, starting with the admin themselves.

Suspending [email protected]

Rule 1: Threats of Violence

packetcat made several posts[1][2] that were perceived as a threat of violence, metered by it being "theoretical". This is not acceptable behavior for any user, especially an instance administrator, irrespective of the intended target of their annoyance.

This comes across as extremely volatile and dangerous, and on any other platform (except the cesspool that is X / Twatter) would be immediately removed.

Rule 6: No Spam

packetcat appears to have been going on a run of posts using several hashtags excessively in ways we, and other instances, have previously actioned as abuse / spam.

In the first case, the #fediblock hashtag was being used for its intended purpose to inform and make other instances aware of abusive conduct by other users. More specifically, their posts[3][4] were about Eris (originally from disqordia.space)[5] -- None of this is at issue as there's a laundry list of poor and "edgy" conduct that the historical receipts appear to cover, and privately corroborated by other instance admins we're in contact with.

However, that then began to devolve into airing their grievances generally and repeatedly escalating their posting when users began to report them, unaware they were the instance administrator of tenforward.social[6][7][8][9][10].

Later, they made two posts[11][12] with the #Mastodon4Harris hashtag for seemingly no other reason than one of their users said they should[13] and wanting to instigate drama[14]. This is just petty and childish trolling.

Rule 3: Harassment of Other Instances and Users

As tenforward.social received reports from other instances, packetcat would post the report[3][6] and in some cases encourage the administrators of other instances to take action against the reporters[10][15]. In the case of latter request to remove content, the linked post has been deleted so assumed to be a valid request to remove content, but their reaction threatening defederation is unwarranted[15].

While this isn't entirely unusual for an admin to do (we reach out and have other instances reach out to discuss reports), airing it in public is not acceptable, especially given tenforward.social's explicit statements about using the report system and confidentiality of reports[16] and then posting an email chain report from a concerned user[17][18]. Revealing private information publicly, especially like this, is utterly unacceptable and a gross violation of trust.

Limiting tenforward.social

As a result of the actions above, we're locally suspending [email protected] across all of our instances, and we're limiting tenforward.social due to the instability of their admin and egregious breach of trust that makes us concerned with interactions going forward.

We realize there are connections back and forth between our Mastodon instances (furry.engineer and pawb.fun) and tenforward.social, so we don't want to unduly impact our users or theirs based solely on their administrator's conduct by suspending and permanently breaking those connections.

Should there be additional poor conduct or an improvement in the situation, we'll re-review our stance in a few weeks time.

Important Reminder

It should really go without saying, but DO NOT use this as an excuse to harass packetcat or anyone else involved in this situation. Any users found doing so will be suspended without warning per Rule 3. While their conduct is unbecoming, it does not warrant abuse.

Clarification: What is a Limit

A limit means that the instance is effectively hidden from view on furry.engineer and pawb.fun. All of the content still exists and can be found if searching or interacting (like following a user on tenforward.social), but won't appear on the public timelines and won't be recommended to our users.

If someone from tenforward.social tries to mention someone on furry.engineer or pawb.fun, and they aren't being followed by that person, the message may not be visible. Similarly, if someone from tenforward.social tries to follow a furry.engineer, or pawb.fun user, they'll instead send a follow request that you'll need to approve.

References

Edits

• Added section "Clarification: What is a Limit"
• Updated deleted image proof from https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/7670f660-3174-467a-a9cf-9da5411c994b.png to https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/82e428b8-83e7-4fb6-8fa2-6a2c4ff0fbca.png. The original had the first post still collapsed.
• Added section "Edits"