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

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.

2/
#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.

3/
#moderation

@mastodonmigration thanks for this thread. One note though, could we do away with the h-word? Plenty of instance admins are hackers, so using this term as a way of referring to cybercriminals or malicious actors is painting with a broad brush.

Other terms exist — "cyber attacks" for example would work well here.

@rysiek Will do. Thank you for the recommendation, and apologies for the misuse of the term.