After some extended discussion with the rest of the Treehouse moderation team, as well as extended discussion with Gina, the new owner of fosstodon, we are planning to take incremental steps that will result in full defederation of fosstodon from Treehouse.

Fosstodon has been a consistent moderation headache for our team for years, initially because of the same problems we have seen from many of the tech instances: drive-by snippy and unhelpful comments like "oh YOU wouldn't be having that problem if you just used GNU/Linux instead!"

In the past year or so, however, things have changed in the nature of the moderation issues we have seen from Fosstodon. While the "reply guy" behaviour is still present, the overall temperature has shifted in the direction of the alt-right, both in terms of moderation incidents and, as recently seen, staffing incidents.

Gina has outlined her philosophy regarding the management of Fosstodon and its role in the greater fediverse, however this blog does not address any of the specific problems we, and our users, have observed from their community.

We are increasingly unconvinced that the situation will improve in any meaningful way, so we conclude that defederation is the only option. These conclusions are always disappointing, but as a community of queer hackers, these decisions are necessary to protect the psychological safety of our local Treehouse community.

As we begin to bring our federated relationship with Fosstodon to a close, we encourage our local community to be thoughtful and kind in regard to their frustrations with the Fosstodon community.

To help with continuity, instead of immediate defederation, Fosstodon will be upgraded to a full limit with report suppression in a few hours following this announcement. This will allow local users to continue to interact with Fosstodon users that they explicitly consent to interacting with while they make the transition to a new instance, and allows for reversal if Fosstodon commits to acceptable management practices which we have already outlined in our discussions with Gina.

In the event that nothing meaningfully changes, Fosstodon will then be fully defederated on July 1.