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]
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.
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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@mastodonmigration
Thanks for this. I recently saw a toot claiming that my server - mastodonapp.uk - is being defederated for tolerating transphobia. I haven't seen any, but I don't want to be tooting into the void.
How can I verify or disprove this allegation? I saw no boosts or replies to the toot. Thx
@taoish That was a misunderstanding between mastodonapp and calckey.social specifically. They defederated for a day or two but were back in communion six days ago.
After talking with @[email protected] , it seems that the reports of transphobia were back from an old post/posts which never federated the delete action properly, leading to a false sense of a lack of admin/moderation action. They're committed to moderating against transphobia, so we are re-federating with mastodonapp.uk! My sincerest apologies for jumping to conclusions over something which clearly required more investigation and outreach.
@clacke Thank you very much. So I can stay on mastadonapp.uk without worrying about being defederated?
I haven't seen a single transphobic post but given UK culture these days (Ricky Gervais as much as JK Rowling) I can't say I would be shocked if there was a problem.
Mastodon Migration
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Mark Saltveit
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