Re a series of boosts: I can now say I've been harassed on Mastodon by an apparently maladjusted donkeykeeper, over the proper use of a hashtag I started.
I wasn't going to write about this but now I may, maybe. In any event that wasn't a sentence I thought I'd ever write!
I just noticed something: the two anonymous posts to me, from the donkeykeeper's alts, were posted on "public" (🌍) and using the hashtag. In other words, they show up in the feed of the tag! For all his concern about keeping only donkeys on the tag.he was perhaps actually trying to hail other defenders of the tag to swarm me, I think--from alts so his fingerprints weren't on it. So the GG comparison is not so far off. #Donkeygate
Screenshot of post from today, user @carrot tells me to step off the Asstodon tag because there is no controversy on the tag, it is just quiet and friendly
Appending publicly here a few thoughts about #Donkeygate that I'd said in stray comments elsewhere/not on the tag. One thing that's been extraordinarily illuminating in this is the Rashomon-like quality of the whole arc: not everyone saw tagged posts containing non-donkey content, i.e. butts. Smaller curated instances filtering tags for NSFW pre-screened posts for those users. Ppl on big, more free-for-all instances did see a few of those posts. This is a Mdon affordance +
& this lossiness meant it was hard for people to have fully shared perspectives on the arc; inhibited search & decentralization worked against anyone who tried to follow arc of the conflict from beginning to end. The burden of figuring out What Really Happened is so great that a reasonable person might give up.
2nd, related: what set this off was a user who had, over time, taken it upon himself to message ppl using Asstodon tag for non-donkey posts asking them to edit out +
that tag. But then one user, who, it seems, was simply offline for ~24 hrs, didn't respond to a req to remove Asstodon # quickly enough for donkeykeeper's taste.
OP had made a NSFW-tagged, CW'ed furry art post, tagged w Asstodon--& came back to being online to find themselves reported to admins & the donkeykeeper having put them on blast publicly, asking others to also report the post. OP did nothing wrong by standards of wider Mdon norms--appropriate CW & NSFW tags. +
& then the OP did remove the tag, & even made a public post apologizing. (Screenshots & links available upon req but I'm not trying to link this person up into the conflict any more than they already were)
I was initially inclined to help mediate a bit but we know how that went.
But for the record, this could have all gone far, far differently. For a counterexample I'd point people to #BearsOfMastodon which seems to have a variety of legitimate, divergent uses all +
sharing the tag without major conflict^ (^that I'm aware of). That seems to be a much healthier model for adopting a polysemous tag, let alone one with an entendre potentially related to sexuality.
IMO it's disingenuous for donkeyposters (or viewers) who wanna orient around a tag that operates on this wink to be outraged when the entendre pops up. It's at least as disingenuous, given original constituencies of Mdon, to think puritanical donkeykeepers have more claim +
to space here than someone posting furry art. (It's fine to want to broker a deal so people get offended or mad less often, but that also proved impossible.) And to label the actual post in question "porn" is bordering on "porn gaslighting" (HT @acousticmirror).
Anyway a big part of why I waded in was I felt like someone was getting treated unnecessarily badly on a tag I had co-created & thus felt I had some responsibility for that situation. It has never been about +
claiming either authorship or ownership of the tag.
And this is another thing I think people looking in might not have realized: donkeykeeper telling me to butt out because he in the moment and over time claimed repeatedly that other donkeykeepers had created the Asstodon tag, not me (again, gaslighting). I thus was motivated to correct the historical record, but this wasn't so much about ownership as it was to claim my own right to comment on the matter.
another irony has been a certain user insisting that the # was "only for donkeys, not for media studies"! (I'm now calling this "refusing to do media studies as media studies".) It's been fascinating to see who reacted as "of course you need to have meta-discussion to keep the fediverse ticking along" versus doubling down on claim that there are no politics or choices to discuss here.
Nothing like a good breaching experiment to expose norms!
#donkeygate update w more material from today (sigh). In one, he doxes me again (real surname) & his screenshot discloses that he's reported me to my employer. And a 2nd one where he's also unable to just drop it. (I've initiated no contact of any kind with him; just updated this chronicle in real time.) These have both been deleted, so appending to the historical record here.
THANK YOU to those of you keeping an eye on his donkeysh*t & helping report it.
Idk if a certain Ass still reads my posts, but if so: do everyone a favor and Google DARVO
(Figured this should be on the record for posterity, since the Ass has made a very public show of being the victim of a Vast Media Studies Conspiracy) #Donkeygate
Appending a few posts from months & months ago as an archaeological postscript (note dates). It's curious that a certain donkeykeeper was unaware of tag polysemy given that it was so obvious to seemingly everyone else, from earliest days. It's also curious how me pointing that out drew ire, misogynistic harassment, etc. Very curious indeed.
Since the tag-pouncer ceased policing butts on #Asstodon, I've seen I think two butts. In over two months. They were appropriately CW'ed. Very, very easy to ignore or even filter if you want (filtering out NSFW will catch most of it). It's still well north of 90% donkeys.
(Looking now, only seeing one since late July, but federation is weird, YMMV.)
@inquiline hope I'm not going to be quoted/spied on by academics on Mastodon. Had enough of that behaviour over at the other place. And media, teachers.... :blobcatdevil:
@KarenWyld Not by me. As this paper explains, I didn't come here planning to be doing any research. This only changed for me--and this paper is written as "autoethnography"--when someone harassed me in a dispute over a hashtag last summer. I only quote people who gave me explicit permission (except the harasser who ceded any right to be approached for consent).
IMO it's possible to do research here but ONLY very carefully & with revocable consent. I hope academics get that (the ones I know do)
@inquiline from a casual browsing, the #BearsOfMastodon tag really seems to be a utopia of “oh ok… well, we can make this work!” More of this spirit, everyone! 😄 🐻🏳️🌈
@inquiline "Lossiness" is an interesting effect and term here. (But strange that people want to claim ownership of a tag. Things change, like language, and we have to adapt.)
@markstoneman It was... a peculiar situation. I'm also quite linguistically descriptivist but initially tried to mediate some as if prescriptivist interpretation had more of a claim here than I thought it necessarily did. This hashtag policer got mad at that too! Anyway it was a tempest in a teapot stoked by a very intemperate person, but it actually did reveal some not-great affordances here that I now observe affecting higher-stakes, more damaging conflicts here too...
@seachanger RIGHT?????? and he seems to be in denial that the hashtag relies on entendre to function the way it does. you can't sanitize butts out of ass, sorry
anyway i have done enough antagonizing (i wasn't actually) for one day, but i fully support anyone having whatever fun they will with the tag, which has been the point all along; and i've very much given up trying to mediate on his behalf! so do what you will
@seachanger gaahhhhh.... what today revealed is that our friend has two alts he uses to scold people & agree w his main, real sock puppetry. anyway he went after me. (he also clearly doesn't know how to navigate some of the affordances here very well, like i think he took a post written in january as a recent provocation as that's what he was replying to.) anyway he's doubled down on his position that asstodon is ONLY for donkeys, NOT for butts, NOR for media studies
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