Then he growled with his Grinch throat nervously crowing,
"I MUST find some way to stop Fediverse from growing!"
For Tomorrow he knew the Toot folks of all kinds,
Would wake bright and early. They'd post to timelines!
And then! Oh, the toots! Oh the toots!
Toots! Toots! Toots!
That's one thing he hated! The TOOTS!
TOOTS! TOOTS! TOOTS!
Then the Toots young and old would sit down to their boosts.
And they'd boost! And they'd boost! And they'd BOOST!

BOOST! BOOST! BOOST!
They would boost local timelines, fediverse timelines too.
Which was something the Grinch couldn't possibly do.
And THEN they'd do something he liked least of all!
Every Toot down in Tootville, the tall and the small,
Would see the full timeline, not one paid post or ad.
They'd get more engagement, more good and less bad.
They'd reply! And they'd reply! And they'd REPLY!
REPLY! REPLY! REPLY!

And the more the Grinch thought of this new fediverse,
The more the Grinch thought, "I must now make it worse!"
Why for two or three weeks I've put up with it now!"
"I MUST stop Fediverse from coming! But HOW?"
Then he got an idea! An awful idea!
THE GRINCH GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!
"I know just what to do!" The Grinch laughed till he fell.
He would make his own Mastodon instance from hell.

And he chuckled, and clucked, "What a great Grinchy fate!"
"With this RoR app I can now federate!"
"All I need is sysadmin..." The Grinch looked around.
But, sysadmin were scarce, there was none to be found.
Did that stop the old Grinch? No! The Grinch simply said,
"If I can't find sysadmin, I'll make one instead!"
So he called up his app. Then he started a thread,
And he found someone who'd use their desk as their bed.

THEN he loaded some tabs, and he made a domain,
On a ramshackle instance, and he gave it a name.
Then the Grinch said, "First post!" and his posts started down,
Toward the timelines where Toots lay asnooze in their town.
All their windows were closed. No new posts filled the air.
All the Toots were all dreaming sweet dreams without care.
When he came to the first instance down on the square.

"This is task number one," The old Grinchy man hissed,
And he followed all people on that timeline's list.
Then he slid down the timeline, the app was a cinch.
If FOSS geeks could do it, then so could the Grinch.
He got stuck only once, for a moment or two,
When he wanted to thread, didn't know what to do.
Then he drafted some posts all lined up in a row.
"Content warnings," he grinned, "are the first things to go!"

Then he posted some words designed to get engagement,
Around fediverse that triggered enragement.
Abuse! Politics! Violence! Trolling!
Eye contact! Food! The Grinch kept on going.
And he fired up bots, Then the Grinch, as he roused them,
Liked all his posts, one by one, by the thousands.
Then he slunk to his profile, to watch what he loosed,
He'd get more engagement, he'd get all the boosts!

He flooded that timeline as quick as a flash.
Why that Grinch even trolled the fans of Bitcoin Cash.
The he opened his folder of gifs with a gleam,
"And NOW!" grinned the Grinch, "I will post a dank meme!"
And the Grinch grabbed a gif, his mood was defiant,
When he heard a small sound coming from his mail client.
He opened his mail, something from a small Toot!
Little Cindy-Lou Toot, who just gave him the boot.

The Grinch had been caught by this tiny Toot daughter,
Who'd got out of bed for a cup of cold water.
She stared at the Grinch and said, "New instance, why,"
"Why are you tainting our nice timeline? WHY?"
But, you know, that old Grinch was so smart and so slick,
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!

"Why, my sweet little mod," the rich billionaire lied,
"There's a bug in my instance and hackers inside."
"So I'm taking it down for some upgrades, my dear."
"I'll fix it up there. Then I'll bring it back here."
And his fib fooled the mod. The she shook her mod head,
And he turned off his instance, and she went to bed.

And when Cindy-Lou Toot went to bed with her cup,
He went to his instance and fired it back up!
Then the last thing he did was make his follows higher
By just spawning a bunch of new bots, the old liar.
On his timelines were nothing but memes, trolls and fire.
And the one speck of kindness he left in a post,
Was a compliment shortly preceding a roast.

Then he did the same thing to whole federation
Leaving horrible posts and with no moderation!
It was quarter past dawn... All the Toots, still a-bed,
All the Toots, still asnooze when he posted and fled,
Flooded all of their timelines! The trolling! The hating!
The tags! And the teasing! The terror! The baiting!
Three thousand posts up! All were from his new server
He looked at his mentions with maniac fervor!

"PootPoot to the Toots!" he was grinchishly humming.
"They're finding out now that my instance is coming!"
"They're just waking up! I know just what they'll do!"
"Their mouths will hang open a minute or two,
Then the Toots down in Tootville will all post BooHoo!"
"That's a sight," grinned the Grinch, "That MUST simply be seen!"
So he paused. And the Grinch aimed his eye at his screen.

And he did see some posts rising from his screen's glow
They started in low. Then they started to grow.
But the posts weren't sad! Why, they all sounded merry!
It couldn't be so! But it WAS merry! VERY!
He stared at his timeline! The Grinch popped his eyes!
Then he shook! What he saw was a shocking surprise!
Every Toot down in Tootville, the tall and the small,
Was posting! Without seeing his posts at all!

He HADN'T stopped Fediverse from coming! It CAME!
Because of good mods, it came just the same!
And the Grinch, with his grinch-face-ice-cold at his screen,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: "What does this mean?"
"It came despite trolling! Despite all of my bots!"
"It came despite politics, and my hateful thoughts!"
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!

"Maybe Fediverse," he thought, "isn't driven by hate."
"There are no algorithms that tally and rate!"
And what happened then? Well...in Tootville they say,
That the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day!
And the minute his heart didn't feel quite so tight,
He whizzed with new posts through the bright morning light,
And he posted good posts! And his kindness was loosed!
And he, HE HIMSELF! The Grinch's posts got REAL boosts!

🥇️🥇️

@kyle Thanks, I enjoyed this and looked forward to every installment!

@kyle Thank you for that wonderful story.

@kyle Glorious :D how do you come up with these?

@golemwire I honestly don't know, it's just something that I find my brain doing automatically when someone says something that triggers a song in my mind. This one was triggered by someone referring to Mastodon as "Tootville".

@kyle on a roll