Wow. Several of the instances described are quite clearly rape; with some horrible scarring and degrading stuff through in; exploiting power-imbalance to make it possible. What I struggle to fully understand though are the text messages mentioned in the story. Gaiman argues that there was consent, and there are things said in those text messages that might support him. But the other circumstances, and the pattern of behaviour across multiple victims surely is enough to overrule that.

Do you think Eugen has been personally moderating all Mastodon instances up until now?

He hasn’t. Obviously the moderation system has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.

bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.

One advantage of Pixelfed is that it not a commercial company. So unlike Instagram, they do not have financial motivation to addict and exploit. So for people who are interested in seeing and sharing picture galleries, that seems like a good option to me.

(Personally I don’t use Instagram or Pixelfed, or any other similar service.)

Old internet is where different people had different websites, and they’d link together with web-rings. People would explore and discover and share. The old internet was not dominated by mega-corps. There were no facebook accounts and no google accounts. It was just people sharing their ideas and interests - without trying to turn everything into a side-hustle, or data-harvest or anything like that.