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]
@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.
1/
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)
It's not a scare tactic.
Blocking mastodon.social is now seriously on the cards for many admins, even ones who would never have done it before.
The reason the Fediverse exists is to be decentralised. M.s is way too large now, and getting even larger due to the official app's terrible new onboarding.
If people want this place to be decentralised, they need to move off mastodon.social. If they don't care, then they can expect more fediblocks as m.s grows.
The whole point of this place is to spread the network out:
https://fedi.tips/why-is-the-fediverse-on-so-many-separate-servers/
If the growth of m.s is a threat to this, then that growth needs to be stopped.
Ideally, the owners of m.s would stop taking signups, or at least remove it from the official app. But they're doing exactly the opposite, they're telling everyone to sign up on m.s.
M.s are destroying the driving force of the Fediverse by doing this, m.s need to stop.
@feditips honest question from a non-techie who came here when Twitter was first purchased but not from Twitter: Would it be feasible for new sign ups to be offered the option to be automatically put on a random instance to start? Of course the instances on that list would choose to opt in to it and new users could choose to DIY if they desired. But from my perspective as a still newbie, what instance I ended up on mattered very little as a casual user with no specific focus. I think most people are like me.
I get that the wealth of servers protects the system as a whole from takeover etc and that's great. But asking new users to care what instance they are on and evaluate them from the get go is a big hurdle. It's hard to grok why the choice even matters when one first signs up. So sign new users up to a random one by default to spread everyone around, but give them the option to choose too. Could that work?
Yes, a random server from a trusted pool with good track records is exactly what people are suggesting should happen.
Mastodon Migration
Daniel
FediTips has moved!
cmonster has moved.
Shawn M. Jones, PhD