Welcome everyone!

First of all, what is a 'Yarning Circle'? Well it's a place to have a yarn, a conversation, where everyone can speak as equals. I try to host them every so often to provide an update on the instance and where we’re at, while providing a platform to listen to your feedback.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !commvscomm@quokk.au - Watch Markov Chains engage in simulated Threadiverse discussion as they emulate well known communities
• !fediverse@quokk.au - Our very own community for Fediverse related news, discussions, and insights.
• !quotes@quokk.au - As the name implies, a place to view and share your favourite quotes.

🧑‍💻 What's Up? 🧑‍💻

Wow, so much has happened. There’s been a lot of drama, which I will cover in its own section further below for those who don’t want to worry about such things.

Other than that we had our first Lemmyvision participation, we submitted the song ‘Bars’ by Mudrat, a hard-hitting Australian rap song about media censorship and Palestine. It was a close vote, due to a very limited number of participants. You can still vote in the finals if you wish to join in the remainder of the event.

We released Threadirator, a tool to help promote new communities across PieFed & Lemmy. Along with what I hope is a working bot to track community growth across the Threadiverse. These tools will help PieFed, whereas others have a strong Lemmy focus often not catering to this platform.

@Deceptichum@quokk.au has informed me they are intending to leave Quokk.au due to ongoing drama, and are slowly winding down their posting. We will be looking for new moderators to help manage their comms once they do. Please reach out to me if you’d like to apply for any of those positions.

We have hit 100 active members over the last month, showing a clear trend of growth and engagement. Thank you all for helping make this instance such a great place to be.

The White House has declared radical-transgender people and anarchists as potential enemies of the state. Who knows, maybe in the near future Quokk.au will be banned in the USA.

We have our own Matrix Channel, it's pretty quiet but feel free to join.

I created a new default theme for the instance based on Pine-Rose, along with a new logo.

The report page for community moderators has been updated to provide more helpful information at a glance.

spoiler

We now support donations

🍿 What's the Tea (Drama)? 🍿

What started with a ban of one of our users for German language concerns around the use of the word Nazi, has spiralled into a multi-instance issue where threats of defederation against smaller instances (us, and others) was thrown around to enforce compliance. The FAF has taken steps to reduce the tensions and by removing administrators, reversing bans, and censoring posts. Sadly this has only been met with increased hostility.

Promptly following this was the beginning of a targeted campaign of misinformation and disinformation. First Quokk.au and dbzedr0 were falsely accused of being infiltrated by Neo-Nazis. Luckily this was proven false after some time, but as the saying goes "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." and the damage from this will probably never be undone despite the truth coming out. It does not help that said post was allowed to stay up for hours after it was proven to be manipulated, giving the original post more time to be seen and believed.

A few days later, the lead developer of PieFed seems to have started posting cherry-picked stats to discredit dbzer0 (and the FAF) as ‘ban happy’ for the actions of a sole moderator - one who personally upset this developer by incorrectly labelling them as a ‘ Zionist’ in the modlogs (This has now been rectified by dbzer0).

This was followed up again with another post presenting false and misleading information around the usage of an AI tool to assist moderators in browsing users comment history for patterns of behaivour (Zionism/Genocide Denial in this case), by claiming it was a secretive automated tool that banned users when it simply presented a text file for moderators to view. Please note, this tool has not been used on Quokk.au and I personally do not plan on using it myself, but I will not take issue if any moderators wish to make their job a bit easier.

This has now culminated in PieFed.social’s admin and lead developer making the choice to ‘hide’ our instance from their PieFed instance chooser - Being the flagship instance, this will drastically reduce our visibility to new users and harm our instances future growth. In return I have not ‘hidden’ PieFed.social from our own instance chooser as I do not personally feel the desire to stoop to such a petty low. Depending on how much more we are attacked in the future, I may reverse this decision however.

🧶 Yarn 🧶

We're continuing to grow, and it's great to see so many active users contributing to make this instance a lively place to be. So thank you all for your posts and comments.

If I could make a request, I would love to see more communities being created - if there's anything you're passionate about please don't hesitate to make it so. The more content and places for our community to grow, the more we can help the Fediverse become a replacement for the corporate web.

Is there anything you would like to share?