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Top-level
 The size of mastodon.social means that it is hard to moderate current accounts there. The fact that it is promoted as *the* instance by the official apps, combined with the fact that in the public mind fedi is Mastodon, means it's difficult to effectively moderate new accounts. And its size also means that bad actors are not compartmentalized into small, manageable groups on defederate-able instances. This is bad. 73 comments
The size of mastodon.social is breaking the moderation story of the #Fediverse. Moderation on fedi relies on: 1. instance admins and moderators being able to manage bad actors on their own instance; 2. instance admins being able to silence or defederate from insufficiently moderated instances. Mastodon.social's size and the speed new accounts are set up there means that 1. is very difficult. The size of m.s. and the clout of some of its users means 2. is a hard decision. @rysiek Seriously, who cares about clout? If people want to follow clout then they can join dot social and leave the outside fediverse. Defederate from dot social and let Website Boy have his own personal Twitter. @cutieofchaos clout in the sense of "a lot of people from other instances are following and engaging with them." It's not about some power thing. It's about a social network being social. @rysiek This is the same reason people give over not defederating from Free Speech instances. It doesn't matter. People will move to another instance. Just because this is a form of social media doesn't mean you need to swallow all the trouble instances. Dot social has become a trouble instance. It needs to be cut off. @rysiek  @faduda definitely time to start thinking about it and telling people on m.s it's time to move — or find themselves stranded at some point. Everyone describes the fediverse as similar to email. What would happen if Yahoo refused to send emails through to Gmail because they are too big? Does everyone need ten emails? Some people feel more comfortable on small instances where they feel seen. Some feel more comfortable on a large instance where they blend into a crowd. Let's focus on moderation as the issue and not make people feel guilty for choosing a large instance if it's where they feel most comfortable. > Let's focus on moderation as the issue and not make people feel guilty for choosing a large instance if it's where they feel most comfortable. The problem is, as I have stated repeatedly in this thread, that the size of mastodon.social makes the moderation problem much, much more difficult to deal with. And in the context of the spam attack that started this thread — third in 10 days, all coming from mastodon.social! — the size of mastodon.social *is* the moderation issue. Understood. But think of it this way-- you have people like Neil Gaiman on m.s. with 250k followers. I imagine a good amount of those are not on his instance. You cut him off, and what happens? Do those followers go make an acc on m.s to keep following him, making it even bigger? Does Neil make an account on a smaller instance that very likely can't handle that type of influx? I hear you. I'm just saying that instead of asking the 200k people on m.s. to divide themselves up amongst other instances (basically starting over since posts don't migrate), I think we could solve the problem by throwing more moderators their way. It's hard enough to get people to join mastodon already, de-federating a huge instance is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold who are still trying to figure the place out. It's just bad PR. > I think we could solve the problem by throwing more moderators their way. I disagree, looking at the current growth rate of m.s. > de-federating a huge instance is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold who are still trying to figure the place out. I agree, but we need to find a way to make m.s not "too big to be defederated from." The problem got created by the decision to make a single huge flagship instance in the first place.   @rysiek It also relies on having enough tools, like mastodon moderators/admins are helpless when spam waves aren't centralised on a single instance but instead use a bunch of different open-registration servers or a spam software directly targeting ActivityPub.
@pacanukeha yes it does, but that's externalizing the moderation cost to literally all other instances. And also raising this cost substantially, because now every single other instance has to take action on a bad account, instead of just the originating instance.  It's got to be stopped, and it will only get worse the more it grows. I've been keeping an eye on the meter at https://instances.social/mastodon.social and it currently shows mastodon.social as 13.8% of all Fedi users. I know it will be painful for people to defederate from 1 in 7 users, but it will be a lot less painful than 1 in 4, or 1 in 2, or wherever it is heading for on the current course. @FediThing I wonder if a coordinated one or two day temporary defederation from m.s by a lot of other instances, announced ahead, would provide enough of a shock to the system for this to start getting fixed? Yeah, might be worth considering! I'm waiting for the next update of the official app to see if they fix the onboarding. If they leave it as it is, with m.s still promoted as the main way to sign up, that will say a lot about their intentions (IMO). @FediThing wait, did they mention they are considering removing m.s as the blessed default?  @rysiek @FediThing I think a coordinated mass limiting (i.e. "silencing") for a one to two week period might be enough of a shot across the bow without inconveniencing too many users who are caught in the cross fire without being really aware of the issue. Because of their size/default instance for the official app etc. I feel like limiting is the best near term step. Leaves defed as a final option if things continue to go south. @rysiek @FediThing because a portion of this is a political issue, the coordination should include educating/informing the general population about what is happening, what changes they'll experience as a result, what the goals are, when it will resolve (or escalate if not addressed.) Otherwise we may just drive a bunch of people back to Birdchan/Bluesky because they suddenly lost 1/3 to 1/2 of their followers/following. Yes, definitely. Mastodon gGmbH is setting up lots of unwitting users for a nasty shock, it's very irresponsible of Eugen to play "defederation chicken" like this. Maybe we could take a model from real life industrial disputes, where strikes are brief to begin with and become more frequent if the management refuses to talk? @FediThing @rysiek yep. Exactly. While I think that all who are concerned about the current direction are totally in the right, I think it's important to consider how it plays for what is now a large part of the Mastodon user base who doesn't know/doesn't care, and at least make some attempts to bring them along. Reach/teach those that are reachable/teachable anyway. Some still won't care, but at least an attempt can be made. @mrbitterness@exile.social @rysiek@mstdn.social @FediThing@tech.lgbt  Defederation should be a nuclear option only for virtually unmoderated servers in my book. Blocking larger servers doesn’t do any good, doesn’t encourage users to migrate or set up own servers, and seems self-defeating. Better would be help mid to smaller servers do better distributed outreach and onboarding and teach users on big servers the value and ease of moving to smaller servers. And I say this as an admin of a small/medium server.  @tchambers yeah, that's my concern. let's say that everyone does defederate m.s and people do spread across smaller servers, but after some time one of those grows in size and gets hit by a similar wave of spammers. do we repeat the same thing over and over, further fracturing the Fediverse? at some point most people will grow tired of it. @noodlejetski @tchambers @FediThing or we learn that maybe we should keep instance size in check and spread the load. Large instances disable registrations, admins that want more action open new instances instead of scaling one till infinity and beyond. @rysiek @noodlejetski @tchambers @rysiek It's a server admin's duty to close signups if they are growing too large. They can redirect people to sign up on other servers instead. This is what mastodon.social themselves used to do very regularly. What we need to avoid is any instance being "too big to defederate", it's like banks being "too big to fail".  @tchambers @FediThing @rysiek Yeah, I am happy on mastodon.social but I never discourage people from migrating off. It's a good landing zone, but it's healthy for people to move off into more specific communities.  @tchambers Funny, I've been arguing this too, but I'm starting to come around to @FediThing's position. The combination of John Mastodon's decision to funnel most newbies into his mega-instance, with the persistent crypto-spam coming from it, is the final straw for me. Something's got to give. (1/3) @tchambers a) reverse the decision to funnel all new users of the official apps into his instances b) manually approve all new accounts on them to weed out spammers (2/3) @tchambers d) maintain a mod to user ratio of no lower than X per thousand. Thoughts? (3/3)  @rysiek @campuscodi it seems unsurprising that a system whose abuse prevention is closely modelled on email turns out to have many of the same flaws as email. 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.  @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. @log "oh wait this thing defaults to an instance nobody talks to? uuuhm..." |
Gregory's Server
There was this blogpost I wrote about this huge instance issue, but maybe I should not toot (ha!) my own horn?
Ah screw it, seems on-topic and important:
https://rys.io/en/168.html