I saw a post from well-known TERF and former Truth Social CTO Alex Gleason that he was no longer welcome in the Fediverse Developers Network chat rooms … his instance is widely blocked (as it should be!) so I don’t know how much visibility it got.
Good job banning him, allowing people like him in spaces is toxic – even if they’re just lurking, spying on people, taking screenshots they can decontextualize and distort to sow dissent and spread disinformation. I generally think the “Nazi bar” analogy for social networks is over used, but this is a situation where it really does 100% apply.
And good point that it relates to this issue as well, while his TERFiness and tools to violate consent get most of the focus, he also is a white supremacist. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
That said … the decontextualized screenshot he shared (if it isn’t fake) has the moderator asking him to leave because he made people uncomfortable. That by itself isn’t a good reason to ask people to leave or ban them. My post talking in Clarifying the origin and evolution of the term "the fediverse" - #2 by jdp23 made people uncomfortable (both because it calls attention to the way white male dominance is so normalized around here, whcih people don’t like to acknowledge or talk about, and because of the specific formatting I used to make that point). And I’m white, if I were a Black woman people would be describing me as “angry” and complaining about how my “lack of civility” (or whatever) makes them extra uncomfortable! So I’d either get asked to leave, or told that I need to “moderate my tone” because I was making people “uncomfortable”. And the (decontextualized, potentially fake) screenshot makes it look like a couple of people talked to the moderator who then made a decision … if that’s really how it was, well it was a good decision in this case, but also now’s a very good time to get a better process in place.
So especially in a high-profile case like this it would be great for the moderators and FediDevs admins to issue a statement about what happened – clarifying the grounds and process – and then do some after-action analysis to look at where there are areas for impovement and what else can be learned as well as what went well (and getting him out of there is a very good outcome).