I’m currently on mastodon.social for my instance, and I was informed the other day that because of poor moderation it’s been permanently defedereated by enough instances to make it an issue for users there to have reach outside of their home instance. Is this true? Should I move to a different mastodon instance? Thank you!
I was on an instance that limited mastodon.social, which means you don’t normally see posts from there, and anyone on there that wants to follow you needs permission. But if you follow people there, their posts will appear normally in your feed.
Because of its size, I think a lot of instances are hesitant to defederate completely… (but that’s part of the problem with having such a big instance). I think quite a few limit it though. Some instances list all instances they limit/block and might even have a reason why they do it, but some don’t seem to have any info about that at all.
I moved to an instance where it wasn’t limited. Haven’t noticed a huge difference, either in terms of increased activity or higher levels of abusive posts/bad behaviour.
I would also like to know more about instances being defederated and for what reason this might be happening.
I can help fill in some of the gaps. Mastodon.social is the flagship instance so you get a bunch of people signing up for it, and at times I think some of the reports overwhelm the moderation team. A few weeks ago there was a big issue with spam bots getting through. Some instance owners have a short fuse for this kind of stuff so they opted to defed from it.
Personally, I’m running a small instance so I did not block it. I follow a lot of accounts from there. The spam bots were annoying though.
Okay, that clicks with other things I’ve heard recently. Thank you.
Spam and bots like other people have said. Then there are the instances that get blocked because of the content and people there. Nazis, racists, trolls, etc. They were coming in from all over during the twitter migration. There was a blocklist on GitHub that was being updated pretty frequently.
Interesting. Is there any instance which specifically will not defederate from any other?
There are, but they tend to end up being quickly defederated themselves, because they attract bigots who want to share their bigotry without consequence
there are some, but they tend to quickly become spam and nazi instances. I’m guessing even those ones defederate from the instances that only serve malware though
This is what I want to know. I don’t want to be in a walled garden.
There is no instance that is connected to every other instance, and there never will be. Lets say your instance is a free speech instance that doesn’t defederate any other instance. Even then, there are instances that will actively block your instance because they block all instances that are willing to federate with bigots in the name of free speech.
