Why Blue Ribbon Team and The Cernunnos Foundation Are Leaving the Fediverse
UPDATE: Mastadon did reverse the strikes and purge. We will continue our migration from the platform.
On July 19, 2026, Mastodon removed thirteen of our posts and issued a strike against our account. The stated reason: content created by others must be attributed, and use of generative AI must be disclosed.
We want to be straightforward with our readers about what happened, what was actually purged, and why we’re moving our distribution off Mastodon and the broader fediverse rather than complying with this policy going forward.
What got removed
The list of purged posts covers the actual range of what we do here. It included:
- A piece on clean air and natural systems
- Part 3 of our data center cooling design series
- Part 2 of our River Promenade piece on Johnstown infrastructure
- A report on above-water air rights and the coming legal fight over urban airspace
- Analysis of the new state budget
- Coverage of grid storage economics — sodium-ion as cheap, fireproof, scalable energy storage
- A historical piece on the Seventeenth Amendment and how senators are chosen
- A labor piece asking why organizing still matters
- A single-payer healthcare piece
- A statement that everything The Cernunnos Foundation publishes is free
- A piece on settled knowledge and how it gets assembled
- A scientific challenge to T. rex taxonomy, questioning whether it’s been correctly classified
- A piece challenging the Clovis First theory and the Mound Builder myth
Clean air. Labor. Energy infrastructure. Property rights. Government structure. Healthcare. Scientific classification. History that gets the record straight. This is the work. All of it, purged in one pass, under a policy written to catch plagiarism and repurposed to catch something else entirely.
Why this policy is wrong as applied
We use generative AI as a writing tool. For one of us, it is more than a convenience — it is an accommodation for real, diagnosed conditions that have made sustained, organized written communication difficult for most of a lifetime. Generative AI is the first tool that has allowed clear expression of thoughts that were always there, just never reachable on the page before.
Mastodon’s policy does not distinguish between passing off someone else’s work as your own and using an assistive tool to write your own original ideas in your own voice. It treats both as the same offense. That is not an attribution problem. That is a policy that cannot tell the difference between a person who is lying about authorship and a person who is differently abled and using a tool to communicate.
Worse, the enforcement of this policy requires disclosure — publicly, as a condition of being allowed to post — of the specific nature and extent of that accommodation. That is not a content rule. That is a platform compelling a health disclosure it has no business asking for, and punishing people who decline to make it.
We have filed an appeal. We expect it will not matter to the outcome of our work either way.
What we are actually doing
We are not stopping. Nothing here is funded — there is no ad revenue, no grant, no institutional backer keeping this running. This is unfunded work, done on top of a job, because the work matters regardless of who’s watching. That was true before this strike and it stays true after it.
What changes is where you find it. If you have been following Blue Ribbon Team or The Cernunnos Foundation through Mastodon, through StepBastard’s account, or through any fediverse instance, that thread ends here. The work does not stop — it moves.
Follow the work directly through one of our social channels, linked on The Cernunnos Foundation site or the Blue Ribbon Team page. If clean air, labor history, honest infrastructure reporting, or getting the historical record right matters to you, that’s where to find us going forward.
We have not decided whether to pursue legal action over what we view as an assault on disability accommodation under the ADA. That decision is still open. What is not open is whether we keep doing this work — we do, on every platform that will still have us.
