Why I shut down wizards.town and left Mastodon.

I would like to remember my time on Mastodon fondly but increasingly that’s becoming harder and harder. Originally I came across it through Landon Noss on twitter who was raving about this new service. Always interested in new tech, I decided to go check it out, immediately I felt that usual urge to know how it works. So I fired up my own server and called it wizards.town, I wanted to know how performant it was since it’s a large scale Ruby on Rails project with parts in react and another api in node.

So I opened up a server and started monitoring it. I invited any kind of user in with a strict “no rules” policy.

That was until some users on a Japanese instance started posting lolicon or drawings sexualising underage children.

Disgusted by these images I immediately hard blocked the offending instance, and the mastodon admin and dev community took to replying to a GitHub issue thread about content caching.

This thread which started as a way to discuss how to deal with the problems of having, what could be considered child porn on our servers, Turned into a legal discussion. Because at the heart of it, there’s a very serious legal issue here to be discussed.

It wasn’t till later where a comment made by a new GitHub user “westernotaku” was posted where he/she said things are unfair against the people who draw and consume this child porn. At this time the conversation dropped off, I myself realised that there were people on other instances who would be posting things that I could get into trouble for since my server holds a cache of the other servers.

I decided to take a step back and think about it. And in the end I’ve decided to shut down my server, and walk away from mastodon either for a time or permanently.

There’s good reason. The community is becoming increasingly fractured, instance blocklists are being posted and traded, and I’m guilty of this too. Through this I’ve realised something;

I do not want to spend my own money on an instance that ultimately could get me in trouble.

To curb this I would need to monitor what my users are saying at all times, but this goes against my hands off approach. So I’m closing the server, packing my bags and saying goodbye.