After some years, rescuers arrived at the deserted island to find the man had set up farms, shelter, and modern amenities. He had even cobbled together a server out of fragments of wreckage and was self-hosting two single-user fediverse instances on VMs running Alpine Linux.
"But what is the second one for?" the rescuers asked. "Are you running glitch-soc, or trying out Calckey, or what?"
"Oh," said the man proudly, "that is the instance I refuse to federate with."
(The original joke, if you don't know it, is no. 2 on this list: https://forward.com/schmooze/421730/the-10-best-most-classic-jewish-jokes/)
Seriously, though, the #meta is over the instance simcha.gay/simcha.lgbt defederating from babka.social, another Jewish instance. the announcement: https://simcha.gay/notes/9h9ji15xigz8yctv
a user posted a link to a satirical article (tw: transphobia https://preoccupiedterritory.substack.com/p/use-my-pronouns-also-i-override-the) that likens western leftists calling all Arabs in Israel & the Palestinian territories "Palestinian" as akin to trans people demanding gender-neutral pronouns and claiming there is a trans genocide, implying both are attention-seeking ploys for political convenience.
(this echoes various pro-Israel arguments that "Palestinians" are not really a thing that existed before the establishment of the state of Israel, and that Arabs are well-treated in Israel and self-styled Palestinians are just angry Jew-hating holdouts who simply need to reject their leadership and become Israeli to access rights and equitable treatment.)
so basically a double whammy, virulent transphobia and an attempt to erase Palestinians/paper over existing inequalities and increasing anti-Arab violence in Israeli society.
the babka team deleted the post without disciplining the user, which simcha did not consider sufficient, so they defederated.
then babka announced they would also defederate because of harassment and bullying from simcha admins (https://babka.social/@babka/110726254078880716 / https://archive.is/ieFqJ). needless to say, simcha denies this. the babka team has not gone into specifics or produced receipts/logs.
@hannah
> in my defense it was pretty small when i started
A lot of fediverse server admins seem to labour under the misapprehension they're obliged to have open sign-ups, and to keep them open even when they're being overwhelmed by newbies (not to mention spammers, trolls etc).
#PublicServiceMessage: They're not.
It's perfectly legitimate to make new accounts invite-only from Day 1, or to close signups when your population reaches whatever size you consider manageable.
(1/?)
I suspect there's an unquestioned assumption lurking beneath this perceived need to keep signups open; that signup policy for servers is akin to immigration policy for countries. Ergo, closed signos are akin to being anti-immigration.
This assumption would be fair enough on a centralised platform. Where not being able to join the one server excludes someone from the whole platform. But it does *not* hold water in a decentralised network like the fediverse.
(2/?)
In decentralised networks, being selective about who joins your server is more like being selective about who lives in your home. People can immigrate into your country, even into your neighborhood, without necessarily having to move into your place. Even if you want to share a home with everyone who lives in your neighborhood - or your country - it's seldom practical to do so.
Being selective is unavoidable, if you want to keep your server sustainable and fun.
(3/3)
nev
historic drystone sheep dyke
brennen
Strypey