I’m coming around to the view that Mastodon’s “federation” model is just complete shit. Apparently mas.to (one of the biggest mastodon instances, which I chose to host my bots) has recently chosen to “limit” masthead.social (a journalist-focused instance I chose for my main account). Which means I don’t see toots from the bots I have *explicitly* requested to follow, this happens totally silently, and there is no standard way to detect it.
This architecture sucks.
I had always been quite confident that the “each instance maintainer will do moderation” model would be an abject failure (moderation at scale is hard, but still easier than individual moderation), but I’d assumed that mainstream instances would react by not moderating, leaving space for better mod models. Instead we have many instances that black-hole HUGE swaths of “the fediverse”. Including the amazingly anti-federation practice of blocking mastodon.social.
Not fit for purpose.
Rob Shearer