I recommend that anyone reconsider before signing up for craftodon.social. It used to be the instance where my account was registered, since it seemed like a perfect fit for the audience I wanted to reach.

Voidedmain, the sole owner and operator of craftodon.social, decided to block the entire fosstodon.org instance over controversy surrounding one of its moderators. Both admins and the moderator in question shortly stepped down after the controversy and handed ownership over to Gina, yet they hasn’t unblocked Fosstodon.

Approximately four months later, I reached out to them via Craftodon’s Discord server, which is intended for discussing problems and moderation issues. I wrote a long message explaining why I believe the decision to block Fosstodon was overkill and why it should be unblocked.

I will attach all the screenshots I have of the conversation. I was banned from the Discord server shortly afterward, which meant I couldn’t take more screenshots of the conversation. (will be added later, once I figured how without reaching the Mastodon upload limit).

To summarize what happened: Voidedmain ignored and rejected all the arguments I brought up. Later in the conversation, they shared a blog post by one of the new moderators after Gina took over. The post also sparked controversy and resulted in the moderator stepping down so Fosstodon and Mastodon as a whole wouldn’t be harmed again.

At the time, I was unable to see the issues with this blog post or how it made defederating from the entirety of Fosstodon reasonable, especially since the moderator stepped down. The only problem I noticed was the false representation of German history. Nowadays, I would also criticize how he uses the term “fascism”, but back then it was very unclear to me what it actually meant.

As a result, instead of telling me what’s so wrong with it, they decided to ban me from craftodon.social without the possibility of an appeal. To be fair, They gave me enough time to migrate my account to another instance and inform my followers, which I appreciate.

They seems to restrict anyone who doesn’t fit their worldview and forces it onto those who are registered on Craftodon, as has been the case with Fosstodon.org. There hasn’t been any involvement of the users, as far as I’m aware. It’s been the same for Bluesky bridges.

Craftodon.social promotes itself as:

• “English speaking non-official Minecraft instance. For everyone who plays Minecraft, this instance is a mast!”

• “If you’re looking for an instance that won’t cut you off from your friends or wipe your data willy-nilly, then you have a home here. We aim to be transparent to the community.”

They have also hidden the information on which instances have been blocked or muted. Altogether, this is misleading to people looking for an instance to sign up for.

They stated in our conversation that they would update the description and rules to make it clearer how craftodon.social operates and that it’s a “left community”, but this hasn’t happened yet.

I stayed silent on this topic for a long while and haven’t communicated it publicly, as I was afraid that they might decide to block me at the instance level, meaning that no one on craftodon.social could interact with me and vice versa. But I believe it’s important to share this and my thoughts on it, so others don’t experience the same thing I did.

Voidedmain, if you read this, feel free to get in touch with me or make a response post. I will update the post accordingly.