So what is going on? Recently mastodon.social (m.s) has been the target of crypto spam attacks. Attackers have joined m.s and started to post many irrelevant crypto related posts. Moderators on m.s have tracked down these bad actors and isolated them, but some sneak through while the moderation effort tracks them down. It has been dealt with pretty swiftly.

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#moderation

Also happening recently, Eugen Rochko @Gargron, the developer of Mastodon changed the sign up process, ostensibly to make it simpler, such that people now are funneled onto mastodon.social (m.s) unless they select a different instance. This has been the source of some concern that m.s will be oversubscribed and be vulnerable to hacker attacks, as well as performance issues. Some regard the concentration at m.s as anti-Fediverse in principle.

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#moderation

@Gargron People point to the issue of "too big to defederate" as a reason that large instances like m.s are a bad thing. The logic goes that if bad actors are left unchecked then other instances can not simple defederate m.s because that would block too many other accounts. It is certainly true that it is not really possible to defederate a very large instance so large instances have a big responsibility to police themselves.

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@Gargron Smaller instances always have the threat of defederation as motivation for doing a good job of moderating their users, but bad actors piling on a smaller instance happens too as we have seen in numerous attacks. Simply defederating that instance without any means of re-federation would disenfranchise all those users, so that's another issue that needs our attention.

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@Gargron So the question remains: Should you move to a smaller instance? The answer is you are free to do whatever you want. Some people like smaller instances because of the greater sense of community or common interest. Some people like big instances because of the broader perspective they may afford. It's up to you.

If you are on mastodon.social and want a more intimate experience, open an account on a smaller server and give it a try. It's your social network.

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