Fediverse

Ok, I too would like an explanation for the public/private discrepancy.
First of all, can someone who knows the site specify what precisely those icons mean and who can change the status that they represent? Further, is there a publicly verifiable record of when this status was changed and by whom?

There's a few explanations that come to mind:

• the person doctoring the screenshot also changed the icons. Possible motivation: to have an explanation for why the supposed link they shared was inaccessible (I didn't see them using this excuse - possibly because they realized it is trivial to create an account - but some users were already questioning whether they needed an account to access the post)
• someone unrelated to and possibility unaware of the drama unfolding here changed the visibility for unrelated reasons at some point after the initial "screenshot" was taken. Likelihood: plausible, though not very likely
• after finding a fitting "lookalike" thread, the supposed nefarious db0-infiltrators needed it to be publicly accessible in order to get credible and permanent proof and/or the only one they found happened to be open. Likelihood: while the motivation makes some sense, I think that finding a thread that matches so closely at the roughly correct date is highly unlikely in the first place, so I'm mostly discounting this option

In my estimation, the circumstantial evidence that the original screenshot was deceptively manipulated is pretty compelling and the only evidence of it being legitimate is the say-so of the person who originally posted it.
You might argue that the users existing and the visual aspect of the forum matching also count in favor of the screenshot being real but I think these facts too are better explained by the doctoring hypothesis.

A few more things I would like to note:

• multiple users here seem to take users on that forum making Nazi statements to imply that it is a Nazi forum. As far as I'm aware this was never in question. The actual claim by the original poster was something along the lines of: Nazis on a Nazi forum were bragging about having infiltrated the admin team of db0.
• even if this claim was true, it doesn't come close to proving that the claims of the Nazis are actually true. If they didn't have a reason to make up such stories before, they certainly would now, after seeing how much division and distrust it can sow between liberal/left-leaning communities. Just imagine how easy it would be for them to make a similar post about your own instance admins.

But you buy that Op found a private thread claiming dbz were Nazis?

One that was never provided a working link for, one that overlaps nearly identically with this real link?