Wheaton deactivated his Twitter account earlier this month, citing the company’s decision to keep Alex Jones on its platform. He moved over to Mastodon, one of the only platforms to present itself as a viable, direct rival to Twitter. However, Wheaton says his time on Mastodon was hardly any better. In a lengthy blog post published earlier this week, he describes the community as treating him “with more cruelty, vitriol, hatred, and contempt” that those on Twitter.

[...]

The clear tipping point for Wheaton on Mastodon, though, was a “bofa” prank. (This is a pretty typical internet prank in which one user baits another to ask what the nonsense word “bofa” means, so the original poster can respond with “bofa deez nuts.” It’s sort of like the updog joke.) According to Wheaton, however, the prank wasn’t his only issue.

“I was harassed from the minute I made my account, and though I expected the ‘shut up wesley’s and ‘go fuck yourself’s to taper off after a day or so, it never did,” he wrote. “And even though I never broke any rules on the server I joined ... one of its admins told me they were suspending my account, because they got 60 (!) reports overnight about my account, and they didn’t want to deal with the drama.”