Mastodawn

Mastodon Migration May 14, 2023

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

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Daniel May 15, 2023

@mastodonmigration If you read through #mastoadmin posts after the recent spam wave, some admins definitely blocked or silenced mastodon.social. Some temporary, some longer.

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Mastodon Migration May 15, 2023

@daniel As discussed above, the issue here is not whether some instances temporarily blocked mastodon.social while the attack was going on. The implication was that people on mastodon.social were at risk for being "defederated" and that they should change instances to avoid this. This was a misleading because peoples accounts on mastodon.social are not at risk of being isolated.

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Daniel May 15, 2023

@mastodonmigration I just don't understand where this certainty of your statement comes from or what your intention is. "They will not...", "They're not at risk...".

There are definitely considerations by admins to defederate mastodon.social if it reaches a certain user share: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110260432218416976

And I'm pretty sure I've also seen statements by bigger instances with a couple thousand of users that back this decision (unfortunately the search isn't really good enough to find those posts atm).

The question is also whether the temporary blockings of mastodon.social will at some point become very many temporary blockings which are then actually more or less permanent. The moderation of mastodon.social will definitely suffer as the number of users increases (even if you leave out spam accounts and attacks like yesterday). The other issues were mentioned in the post by @feditips .

If the users can do it and are confident enough, they should definitely register on other instances. If only for the reason of load distribution and to keep the #Fediverse alive and a nice and friendly place.

Btw some of the other fediverse software uses captchas to prevent bot accounts.

FediTips has moved! (@[email protected])

I don't think people are realising the danger the Fediverse is in. The only thing stopping corporations and VCs taking over this place is that the Fediverse is spread out on many different servers, which makes it very difficult to purchase. If most of the Fediverse ends up on mastodon.social, which is now a strong possibility, there will be nothing to stop most of it being sold to Musk or Zuckerberg or whoever. The bigger mastodon.social becomes, the more likely a buyout is to happen. (1/4)

Mastodon 🐘

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Mastodon Migration

@daniel @feditips These seem like two separable issues. 1) Vulnerability to hacker attacks and 2) The wisdom of have very large instances. We should be discussing both, but not necessarily conflating the two. You raise a good point that captchas to validate sign ups may be a good thing to reduce hacker spam. The feditips article raises a myriad of good reasons why large instances carry risk for our future. Neither of these are simple matters and they don't necessarily go together.