I want to be clear I am not advocating de-federating from mastodon.social today. I used de-federation as an example to underline the problem related to the size of m.s.
And as many people have noted in replies to this thread, there are many other tools at admins'/mods' disposal, like silencing an instance.
Defederation is a nuclear option and should only ever be used as an absolutely last-resort.
Good thread by @mastodonmigration on the spam and m.s size issue, helping to lower the temperature that my thread inadvertently raised a bit high:
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/110369611628130098
My first toot in this thread was a bit too hyperbolic. I stand by *what* I said, but *how* I said it could have been a bit better. I put it behind a CW now.
People are having opinions in replies, and some of these opinions are expressed in quite an un-excellent way. That's not helpful.
The size of mastodon.social *is* a problem, though.
As the responses in this thread show, it is a source of real tensions between Gargron and a lot of fedi admins. Pretending this is not the case is folly.
@rysiek But on the other hand, defederating mastodon.social would be both deeply ironic and absolutely hilarious for about the first 6 hours, followed by 18 weeks of being a bit cruel and unnecessary, before finally becoming funny again. Alas, moderators must be more philosophical in their outlook, so the joke must remain unpractical.
@rysiek @mastodonmigration thanks for the explanation - helps a bunch!
@rysiek You seem to have (unintentionally) created quite the moral panic in some corners of the fedi! There's stuff to discuss about how the fedi is being shaped and is shaping itself, but some of the vitriol and panic feels like Twitter main character drama to me! I get it that admins feel a sense of ownership over their instances but maybe we also need to talk about working in non-hierarchical structures, power sharing, ownership vs sharing/belonging to a collective, etc. @mastodonmigration
@rysiek To be clear, I do understand that admin and moderating takes work, no matter the size of an instance. This, of course, is also why not everyone needs to our should be running their own instance, it can require a lot of different skills that one person rarely embodies (which is fine if it's just for oneself, once one's running a general instance it gets more complicated). @mastodonmigration
@rysiek @mastodonmigration not high enough, imho. their instance size is a problem, and they should, as authors of both the server software and the "official" app, block registrations and redirect users to other instances at least until they implement complete (incl. posts) account migration.
@rysiek @mastodonmigration also kinda worth noting when discussing spam & poor moderation that Mastodon's filtering tools are trash compared to Pleroma/Akkoma MRFs, and that this is reflective of Gargron's priorities
Your chart is ready, and can be found here:
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartodon/110375427777886805.svg
Things may have changed since I started compiling that, and some things may have been inaccessible.
In particular, the very nature of the fediverse means some toots may never have made it to my instance, in which case I can't see them, and can't include them.
The chart will eventually be deleted, so if you'd like to keep it, make sure you download a copy.