The vast majority of Fediverse (aka Mastodon, Pleroma, and other compatible software) instances, including the Mastodon flagship mastodon.social, have what I'd consider fairly reasonable rules + codes of conduct [External Link]. Of course, open source tools are open, so anyone with the skills to put them together can do so, and it wasn't long before instances started sprouting up for 'free speech fans' at best, and wholly blatant Neo-Nazi & 'Alt-Right' at worst. These instances would sprout up, and deliberately target other instances with users who are LGBTQ2+ or racialised, and harass them with barrages of threatening messages, so instance administrators had to get into a game of whack-a-mole, suspending federation with a handful of these new instances a week to help protect their users from that kind of abuse.

One of the more 'interesting' things that happened was an alt-right social network called Gab [External Link] forked a copy of the Mastodon (and Tusky - a popular Android client) codebase, and migrated to it, with the same kind of results.

By this point, instance admins were starting to get very suspicious of new systems connecting + trying to federate with them, checking the self-proclaimed rules + code of conduct pages, and in many cases making the move to suspend federation before the first interactions even happen. In some cases, there's nothing posted there at all, so you either dig deeper or give them the benefit of the doubt and let it slide, waiting for the potential first reports of abuse.

Here's where Purism gets involved: they, too, fork the Mastodon and Tusky codebases, to... put it behind a paywall as part of their paid service offering, Librem One [External Link]. To a network of instances where people put in communal effort and run off of donations, that read a little weird, but hey, that's their call. Canonical, Red Hat, SuSE, etc. all charge for some of their offerings despite being open source, right?

Users start signing up for Librem One, getting their new account on the Fediverse, and... some of them start sending the same, targeted, hateful and abusive messages to other instances. Now, when this happens from an instance that you otherwise normally trust or at least want to give the benefit of the doubt to, you can use the built-in reporting feature to report a user's harassment to the instance admins - of both the sender and receiver - who can each opt to act; the receiving instance can suspend receiving messages just from the one offending account, for example, but when it becomes a pattern, the onus is on the sending instance - i.e., where the abusers have their accounts - to act. Basically, to moderate their own platform.

As more and more abusers realised they could spend a couple bucks on a Librem One account and gain access to their targets, more instances on the receiving end started reaching out to the admins on the Purism side to report them. When no answer was forthcoming, the follow up 'what gives?' led to an interesting exchange - Purism actively refused to moderate their instance, because these were paying users. No matter how detailed the reports, no matter how egregious the messages coming from their users, they were paying users, first and foremost, so aside from 'don't break our servers', there were basically no rules. Higher-ups at Purism doubled down on this messaging, so pretty much every instance I've interacted with started suspending federation with Librem One - their only recourse to stem the tide of abusive messaging coming from it, and have been extremely wary of Purism ever since.

Other little tidbits show up from time to time, like how their Marketing Director ragged on Mozilla for supporting RiseUp.net [External Link], saying they were supporting domestic terrorism, and then tried to backpedal when called out for it.

I love the idea of what Purism does, but they milkshake ducked [External Link] really hard when they announced that they were launching their own, subscription based Mastodon [External Link] instance... and that they weren't going to moderate it basically at all because hey, people are paying for it.

Their front-end, of course, was just a forked + reskinned version of Tusky [External Link] - fine on its own, but when Tusky lets you specify the instance URL anyway, it felt a lot like a 'no, I made this!' kind of fork than anything actually productive. Exactly the same tactic some 'well known' ultra-fascist sites use - forking both it and Mastodon and refusing to moderate in the name of 'free speech'.

Anyone on the Fediverse can probably guess what happened next - a bunch of fascists found the Purism instance, figured hey, paying a couple bucks a month/year or whatever to have access to a well known platform is great - and promptly started harassing everyone else they could find out of their usual targets, forcing pretty much everyone else to block them on a server federation level, which then solicitied cries from people along the lines of 'but what about all the other, good users on Purism's instance?', a bit of hand-wringing, and finally an ultimatum to Purism:

Moderate your instance and get rid of the abusers harassing everyone else, or we keep blocking you.

They refused and as far as I can tell, continue to refuse to moderate their users, so the rest of us continue to block them. 'Free speech' doesn't mean 'free to harass everyone else about their race/gender/skin colour/sexuality/politics/etc.', as far as the rest of us are concerned, and the way Purism kept doubling down left us all with a lot of mistrust for everything they do.