I’m currently on mastodon.social for my instance, and I was informed the other day that because of poor moderation it’s been permanently defedereated by enough instances to make it an issue for users there to have reach outside of their home instance. Is this true? Should I move to a different mastodon instance? Thank you!
I was on an instance that limited mastodon.social, which means you don’t normally see posts from there, and anyone on there that wants to follow you needs permission. But if you follow people there, their posts will appear normally in your feed.
Because of its size, I think a lot of instances are hesitant to defederate mastodon.social completely… (but that’s part of the problem with having such a big instance). I think quite a few limit it though. Some instances list all instances they limit/block and might even have a reason why they do it, but some don’t seem to have any info about that at all.
I moved to an instance where it wasn’t limited. Haven’t noticed a huge difference, either in terms of increased activity or higher levels of abusive posts/bad behaviour.
I would also like to know more about instances being defederated and for what reason this might be happening.
I can help fill in some of the gaps. Mastodon.social is the flagship instance so you get a bunch of people signing up for it, and at times I think some of the reports overwhelm the moderation team. A few weeks ago there was a big issue with spam bots getting through. Some instance owners have a short fuse for this kind of stuff so they opted to defed from it.
Personally, I’m running a small instance so I did not block it. I follow a lot of accounts from there. The spam bots were annoying though.
I do know of several instances that throttle or defederate mastodon.social so that part is true. Fortunately migration is fairly straightforward if you’re worried about that though!
What’s the reason for defederating from them? Aren’t they like the original Masto instance? What kind of moderation issues are going on there?
They’re slow to respond to moderation issues. Which is fine when you’re talking about 1 errant user on a small instance, but it’s not so great when you’re talking about a small but ever present percentage of problem users on a mega instance
The reasons I’ve seen given is that it’s a huge instance and at one point only had 1 moderator. So when instance admins complained about a user there, they didn’t always get a response. I think they’ve got more moderators there now, but not sure if it’s solved the problem.
Some Mastodon admins are very concerned about protecting their users from abuse, and want to limit it as much as possible. And that might be 100% appropriate for their users… people who don’t like it should move to a different instance.
Interesting. Is there any instance which specifically will not defederate from any other?
There are, but they tend to end up being quickly defederated themselves, because they attract bigots who want to share their bigotry without consequence
there are some, but they tend to quickly become spam and nazi instances. I’m guessing even those ones defederate from the instances that only serve malware though
This is what I want to know. I don’t want to be in a walled garden.
There is no instance that is connected to every other instance, and there never will be. Lets say your instance is a free speech instance that doesn’t defederate any other instance. Even then, there are instances that will actively block your instance because they block all instances that are willing to federate with bigots in the name of free speech.
