We are truly sorry to report an incident around 18:00 EDT on 18 Oct in which one of our moderators had taken it upon themselves, without consent or knowledge of the rest of the team, to briefly suspend and unsuspend connections to some instances which were aligned with mastodon.art's fediblock on tech.lgbt. While the connections were immediately restored, follows between servers have been lost. The affected servers are:
blackqueer.life (13 users affected)
strangeobject.space (201 users affected)
sunbeam.city (146 users affected)
The moderator thought that severing these briefly would break the tension and hostility the team had seen between these connections, and told this to strangeobject.space when asked. Severing connections is NOT a way to break hostility in threads and DMs. The moderator has had administrative privileges revoked until staff is trained to replace them. Only senior moderators will be handling any future administrative actions and communications.
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Our policy on defederation has never been reactionary. We do not perform guilt by association moderation nor do we enforce our server rules on others. How other servers wish to operate is up to them. We even allow criticisms of our team to exist short of harassment, but any actions are only taken on an individual level and not on an instance level. Instance admin criticism does not equal instance level action.
Due to the nature of how tech.lgbt moderators conduct investigations on reports and ratifying instance suspensions, these time intensive processes will be slowed as we are now prioritizing replacement moderators to alleviate our short staff. Do continue to file reports to us in the meantime and they will be addressed when possible. All other server operations will continue as normal.
We again are truly sorry this has happened after several weeks of trying to keep operations normal during these abnormal times. You all deserve better and we will not allow this mistake to happen again.
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We are currently accessing backup data to get exact information on which follows were severed, from which we can then look for next steps and a path towards full recovery, possibly also in accordance with the admins of the impacted servers.
We've reached out to strangeobject.space and blackqueer.life yesterday, via email (from our technician), and are awaiting a response.
We're able to restore the connections from our end to these servers, but due to the fact that both servers have this server limited, we think it's best to discuss and agree on this, before we execute a script from both sides that would send out follow requests en-masse based on backup data.
Strangeobject.space has reached out to us and OK'd the script on our side, users who had connections in the direction of strangeobject.space will regain these, once these follow requests get accepted.
(Due to a flaw in the script that would erroneously skip over some local users, we have had to re-run it again, apologies to any strangeobject.space user who have had to re-run through follow requests as a result of this)
@chirpbirb@meow.social@mods that's good news, hopefully this can get resolved soon. thanks for your hard work through this rough situation. 
@gray17@mastodon.social@mods is this one-way or both ways?
@gray17 one way, tech.lgbt to strangeobject.space. To recover both ways, their administration also needs to run this script.