So here's what makes me nervous about the Fediverse: Over the weekend, two admins had a disagreement & defederated their servers. They then resolved their differences and refederated.
Only problem is, all follows across those two servers were broken and people now need to recreate them manually. And depending on whether or not they were following the drama, they may not even know why it happened.
This is, in a word, bad. It puts a burden on users for something that was out of their control.
@rlux Oh my. That's not ideal. Good feature for an app though - save the following list daily for re-import. (I'm doing that with python and cron today)
@rlux Fully expected to see a bunch of replies telling how that's a good thing actually. People always act like if you mention any flaws in Mastodon it's going to wish you into the cornfield.
@rlux FWIW, my take on this:
1) sometimes you DO need to defederate a server.
2) You're under pressure to act quickly because one of the legit reasons to defederate is if that server isn't dealing with their problems quickly. This leads to a hair-trigger attitude.
3) If I just block you, and you are on another server, probably you can read my posts anyway! Not true if my server defederates yours. Even more reason for (2)
4) There's an option that fixes (3) but it's not set by default!