Witches.town
witches.town (WT) is still, as of this writing, a Mastodon instance. @TheSupreme@witches.town, sysop of the instance, announced on 2018-04-02 that she will be shutting down the service on 2018-04-30.
WT had been a somewhat quirky instance (e.g. the limit for toots is 666 characters rather than the standard 500, and special symbols were apparently given to users with exactly 666 followers) with a very loyal membership.
This followed an earlier surprise takeover on March 27 in which @TheSupreme removed all the other sysops, giving the following explanation:
Half of the moderation team was thinking of leaving and was not doing much anyway, the other half was getting endlessly stuck in "non-decision wait and see mode". This alone let some heavy shitstorms live their lives.
The thing that made me dissolve the team yesterday was a decision made by an admin to suspend the account of a trans woman based on an old smear campaign pushed by 4 chan with the subsequent support of the majority of the team.
Giving credit to 4chan, the gamergate and the alt-right is never ok. So I stepped in.
The April 2 announcement was followed up by a later toot noting that she was unwilling to let someone else take over the service (thus contradicting the "burnout" explanation), but without saying why.
The code customizations used by WT are currently still available on GitHub.
Toots
all times are EDST
- 2018-04-02
- 12:05 That's it. I'm burnt out. I terminated the server lease.
- 10:03 Reaaaally hot take about transidentity. Be careful, you're about to get yourself burned.
- @Alda@itch.fr is apparently the main account for @TheSupreme@witches.town (see 03-27 toot).
- 2018-03-27 I am taking back the management of WitchesTown.