Clarification

You do not have to worry about your mastodon.social (m.s) account being defederated.

There is a well meaning, but misleading post currently promoted that suggests you should move your m.s account because:

1) "Instance admins are considering defederating them"
2) "Their admin is making spam accounts easier to create."

Very few, if any, instances are considering blocking m.s, and the recent spam attacks are worthy of sober discussion, not hyperbole. [more]

1/
#moderation

@mastodonmigration depends...

In the end it's up to every server & instance admin to make a decisin.

Personally I'd recommend people who can to do #SelfHosting.

Also based off #TooBigToBlock issues with #eMail - #Spamming, I think we need to avoid creating the #Fediverse  - equivalents of #GMail  , #YahooMail  & #Outlook.com where said hosters get away with ignoring #abuse #reports...

Sometimes a precendent must be set and "Fix your spamming or GTFO" is reasonable.

@mastodonmigration and yes, some instances like kolektiva.social did in fact block mastodon.social until they fix their #Spam issues...

https://kolektiva.social/@shrugdealer/110370170067546617

ted cutezynski¹ (@[email protected])

Thank you to the friendly folks that told me that the instance has blocked mastodon.social until their spam bot situation is under control. I've been avoiding a lot today and didn't see that. Appreciate it!

kolektiva.social

@kkarhan There seem to be a small number of instances that temporarily partially defederated mastodon.social (m.s) WHILE the crypto attacks were underway and being addressed. Rather than use this fact to scare m.s users that they face some sort of permanent isolation, it might be better to be clear about what is actually happening. This, by David Carroll @profcarroll is a much more sober and helpful post (https://federate.social/@profcarroll/110368100537767122).

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#moderation

David Carroll (@[email protected])

One emergent downside of being on mastodon.social is that you’ll get a temporary defed by a subset of the fedi while a #cryptospam op is going down

federate.social

@mastodonmigration @profcarroll

1. I'm not scaring anyone.

2. I see the problem that the  is centralizing in a single instance like mastodon.social  as a real issue.

3. Just like #Spamhaus's denylistings, such community self-defense actions are dynamic and not 100% permanent...

4. It's good to see #spamming being not just frowned upon, but actually acted upon.

@kkarhan @profcarroll Not saying you are trying to scare anyone, but the subject post certainly is.

And certainly centralization in a big instance, or concentration in a few large instances, is a community issue. We should definitely have discussions about this. But conflating big instances with cryto spam hacker problems is inaccurate and misleading and does a disservice to the larger issues of the desirability of decentralization for a whole myriad of reasons.

@mastodonmigration @profcarroll

Case in point: As I expect this to set a precedent,#abuse handling - regard liss #spam or lack of #moderation, will get fine-tuned over time.

I think the overall outcome is good and if admins are scared that their lack of care will have defederation as consequence, then maybe that's a necessary price to pay.

Just like I'd certainly face consequences if I were to leave a machine unmaintained online for ages.