Hi friends. Sorry for mentioning the dark underbelly of the internet / Fediverse but I wanted to show you how trolls operate - and how empowering it is to be able to immediately defederate from their instance(s).

Yesterday I was on the receiving end of vile, abusive messages from a handful of accounts. That stopped for a few hours but some fine individuals discovered that I had not blocked a couple of instances notorious for abuse.

And so someone posted: “I found a [transphobic comment] supporting instance that hasn’t defederated NiceCrew yet. Go nuts.”

“Go nuts.”

This sent chills down my spine.

By a super lucky coincidence, I had just sat down on my return train and opened up my iPad. The admin page for my GoToSocial account was still open on the instance block list. It took me exactly 10 seconds to add nicecrew [dot]digital and clew [dot] lol to the list. I had been offline all day and I thank my lucky stars for the fortunate timing, because I only saw ONE vile, abusive image from a troll. That’s it.

This is in contrast to my time on Twitter 1.0.

Once I upset a famous actor (and MAGA sympathizer) who had 6 million followers. He stumbled upon a tweet of mine that criticized a sexist incident at the Cannes Film Festival. Well, this actor (who shall remain nameless) encouraged his followers to harass me and I was inundated with hundreds of abusive comments for days. There was nothing I could do except make my account private for a week.

Here on the Fediverse at least I can defederate from abusive instances. And if someone sends me abuse from a more traditional instance, I could report the account to the mods and said account could be banned.

Anyway, I’ll be spending the weekend with family but I will definitely bring along my laptop and get up to speed with block lists, adding them to all my self-hosted accounts.

Thanks for all your help and advice yesterday - and for the timeline cleanse with the pics of your cute pets ❤️

#MySoCalledSudoLife #FediBlock