this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there's actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I'm wrong.
Pulling out the banhammer and limiting almost 10k users for a disagreement between admins feels childish, imho. They could've just as well blocked just the admin of firefish.social from interacting with mastodon.art users. If I were on mastodon.art, I'd be migrating to space with saner administration.
Edit: Clarity.
It's not beef between two admins. Mastodon.art is strictly a "safes pace", so the admin choses what's safe.
Obviously, an instance admin having no issues with racism is a big fucking red flag about how they mod their instance.
In order to protect their instance and people on it, it's safer to defederate, than count "strikes" and send warnings.
Meh, it's their instance they can do what they like. Not a fan? Move to another instance, it takes two clicks.
Yeah drama sucks, but we all get to pick a side (or not) and move on. All this really does is give both parties attention, and they seem to be loving it.
I’m pretty sure Akkoma allows for several levels before the admins fully defed another instance. Like, I think one is that they can take an instances off the public timeline. And I think it’ll be great when individual users can block instances (on the server side) so it doesn’t have to be on the admins and have ad much of an effect on the communities at large.
You know, it reminds me of that as well but I have an opposite take. The forums I was most active on in the early 2000s were generally ones that had split from larger ones and had became smaller but much stronger and more personal communities as a result. You had the luxury of breaking off precisely because there was no expectation that one community would ever have a monopoly for a topic. Maybe my experience is unique, I don't know.
I can't speak for the specific situation here because I don't know anything about these instances. But the ability for people to split off after a terminal disagreement has generally struck me as a strong point to the voluntary federation we have.