Maybe I should just abandon this fediverse thing.
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@thenexusofprivacy @poundquerydotinfo Yep, I had read your post and associated links already, very informative.
The short notice is what's hurting the most right now, there's a mismatch between "we'll defederate within 24 hours" and "it takes a week to create a new account and a month to migrate to it"
Yeah, the short notice really is a problem. I don’t know he many instances really will act that quickly but still. One thing to do is export your followers / following lists now, before any defederation. That way if it takes a while to get to someplace new you can manually restore them. Which isn’t great, the whole situation really highlights just how bad things are on this front in general
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Yeah, the short notice really is a problem. I don’t know he many instances really will act that quickly but still. One thing to do is export your followers / following lists now, before any defederation. That way if it takes a while to get to someplace new you can manually restore them. Which isn’t great, the whole situation really highlights just how bad things are on this front in general
@thenexusofprivacy @poundquerydotinfo My understanding is that my followers list can only be migrated through the migration process... and, even if it could be done manually, fosstodon doesn't allow me to export it, so in the end it's half a dozen of one or six of the other.
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@thenexusofprivacy @poundquerydotinfo My understanding is that my followers list can only be migrated through the migration process... and, even if it could be done manually, fosstodon doesn't allow me to export it, so in the end it's half a dozen of one or six of the other.
oops, right you are -- I had forgotten that you can't export followers.
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A different way of looking at it is that it very much is the admins at fosstodon who are threatening your connections to the rest of fedi. They're the ones who put somebody with anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT views in a position of authority. They're the ones who doubled down and didn't see anything wrong with it. So now it's up to the mostly good faith users to come up with a way that fosstodon can convince the rest of fedi that no, these aren't actually the instances views -- and then convince the admins to go that route. Which sucks, but it really is the admins' fault that it got to this point.
And @poundquerydotinfo yes everybody is very aware of how much damage defederation of large instances does. tbh that's the main reason fosstodon hasn't already been widely defederated after multiple past incidents. It really is seen as a last resort.
@thenexusofprivacy @jbqueru I wouldn't say well aware because this isn't being managed properly.
Here's one completely obvious way to have handled it:
- Make an agreement with like minded admins of other instances to take refugees from the misbehaving instance.
- Make a public announcement that the instance will be mass defederated in, say, four weeks, assuming no changes are made at the misbehaving instance.
- Provide full and complete instructions to Fosstodon users on how to get accounts at the cooperating instances.
- Run this campaign continuously until the issue is resolved or the deadline is met, so the good faith users have the time and information needed to move.None of this is hard. Those organizing the defederation have done the exact opposite. If they're "aware of how much damage defederation of large instances does" then they're not showing it.
This kind of mismanagement will drive good, wanted, people out of our network. We can do better.
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@thenexusofprivacy @jbqueru I wouldn't say well aware because this isn't being managed properly.
Here's one completely obvious way to have handled it:
- Make an agreement with like minded admins of other instances to take refugees from the misbehaving instance.
- Make a public announcement that the instance will be mass defederated in, say, four weeks, assuming no changes are made at the misbehaving instance.
- Provide full and complete instructions to Fosstodon users on how to get accounts at the cooperating instances.
- Run this campaign continuously until the issue is resolved or the deadline is met, so the good faith users have the time and information needed to move.None of this is hard. Those organizing the defederation have done the exact opposite. If they're "aware of how much damage defederation of large instances does" then they're not showing it.
This kind of mismanagement will drive good, wanted, people out of our network. We can do better.
I agree that situations like this often cause people to leave fedi ... and that a list of instances who are throwing out the welcome mat for soon-to-be-former fosstodon users, as well as moving instructions, would be useful. That's be a great thing for soon-to-be-former Fosstodon users -- or the instances who want an influx of former fosstodon users -- to put together.
In other wauys, though, I see it differently than you. People are certainly the downsides of defederating large instances -- it's called the "too big to defederate" problem, and like I say it's the reason that many instances had already defederated fosstodon. And, fedi has a bunch of problems that defederation highlights: the challenges of finding new instances, the difficulties of migrating, the lack of good channels or processes for "federated diplomacy".
But you seem to be assuming that people "organizing the defederation", which isn't the case. Instead, it's individual admins taking actions (in accordace with their policies, and sometimes after consulting with people on their interest), generally without coordinating. The announcements I've seen are generally the standard "limit now, defederate in a week" but in cases where admins see it as more urgent (or had long ago limited fosstodon and/or let people on their instance know that fosstodon's on the verge of defederation) that's certainly their perogative.
Also while short notice sucks, this latest incident (which has been going on for over a week) follows on years of incidents. The the racist, anti-trans "no politics" isn't new and has been discussed before, and that's only one of the many reasons the instance is often referred to as "fossbrodon." So "good faith" Fosstodon users have had plenty of time to explore options.
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I agree that situations like this often cause people to leave fedi ... and that a list of instances who are throwing out the welcome mat for soon-to-be-former fosstodon users, as well as moving instructions, would be useful. That's be a great thing for soon-to-be-former Fosstodon users -- or the instances who want an influx of former fosstodon users -- to put together.
In other wauys, though, I see it differently than you. People are certainly the downsides of defederating large instances -- it's called the "too big to defederate" problem, and like I say it's the reason that many instances had already defederated fosstodon. And, fedi has a bunch of problems that defederation highlights: the challenges of finding new instances, the difficulties of migrating, the lack of good channels or processes for "federated diplomacy".
But you seem to be assuming that people "organizing the defederation", which isn't the case. Instead, it's individual admins taking actions (in accordace with their policies, and sometimes after consulting with people on their interest), generally without coordinating. The announcements I've seen are generally the standard "limit now, defederate in a week" but in cases where admins see it as more urgent (or had long ago limited fosstodon and/or let people on their instance know that fosstodon's on the verge of defederation) that's certainly their perogative.
Also while short notice sucks, this latest incident (which has been going on for over a week) follows on years of incidents. The the racist, anti-trans "no politics" isn't new and has been discussed before, and that's only one of the many reasons the instance is often referred to as "fossbrodon." So "good faith" Fosstodon users have had plenty of time to explore options.
@thenexusofprivacy @poundquerydotinfo Yup, I agree. There are no good options. Deep inside, the frustrating aspect is that technology isn't keeping up with the human aspect. If migrating between instances could be done reliably in a few clicks and an hour, that'd be fine, but the process as it is today is both slow and lossy.
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@thenexusofprivacy @poundquerydotinfo Yup, I agree. There are no good options. Deep inside, the frustrating aspect is that technology isn't keeping up with the human aspect. If migrating between instances could be done reliably in a few clicks and an hour, that'd be fine, but the process as it is today is both slow and lossy.
Yeah. @yoasif makes a similar point in https://mastodon.social/@yoasif/114411140875703320
Of course, Mastodon gGmbH is not only in charge of priorities for the official Mastodon release, they also run the largest instance -- and the one that new users are signed up to by default. So that might have something to do with their lack of priotrization of this functionality that people have been begging for since 2017 if not earlier. To be fair, it's not actually as straightforward as it seems; you have to deal with complexities like different post lengths, different moderation policies (and in some cases different laws about what illegal content), etc etc etc. But still. It's really an area where progress needs to be made.
Similarly with finding an instance! There are a lot of useful resources in my article, but who wants to read a 5000+ word article and follow dozens of links to find an instance? I wrote about this in the "Why not help people choose an instance that's a good fit?" section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/flatness/#why-not .... very trustrating.
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Yeah. @yoasif makes a similar point in https://mastodon.social/@yoasif/114411140875703320
Of course, Mastodon gGmbH is not only in charge of priorities for the official Mastodon release, they also run the largest instance -- and the one that new users are signed up to by default. So that might have something to do with their lack of priotrization of this functionality that people have been begging for since 2017 if not earlier. To be fair, it's not actually as straightforward as it seems; you have to deal with complexities like different post lengths, different moderation policies (and in some cases different laws about what illegal content), etc etc etc. But still. It's really an area where progress needs to be made.
Similarly with finding an instance! There are a lot of useful resources in my article, but who wants to read a 5000+ word article and follow dozens of links to find an instance? I wrote about this in the "Why not help people choose an instance that's a good fit?" section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/flatness/#why-not .... very trustrating.
@thenexusofprivacy @yoasif @poundquerydotinfo No argument about the complexity of the migration. I get the part about the content itself, and I do agree.
I do remain frustrated that it's hard or impossible to know which followers or follows I've lost or why, and just about impossible to know ahead of time, for an operation that is somewhat irreversible in practice.
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@thenexusofprivacy @yoasif @poundquerydotinfo No argument about the complexity of the migration. I get the part about the content itself, and I do agree.
I do remain frustrated that it's hard or impossible to know which followers or follows I've lost or why, and just about impossible to know ahead of time, for an operation that is somewhat irreversible in practice.
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@thenexusofprivacy @yoasif @poundquerydotinfo Of course, my memory is a bit vague, but I seem to remember that fosstodon was listed in some of the instance directories back in 2022, that's how I chose it. As a noob, there seemed to be nothing wrong with it.
I'm still not sure what I did wrong when I chose fosstodon as an instance, that could have been avoided so that I wouldn't have lost all that data. And, from there, I don't know whether I've just made the same mistake again.
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@thenexusofprivacy @yoasif @poundquerydotinfo Of course, my memory is a bit vague, but I seem to remember that fosstodon was listed in some of the instance directories back in 2022, that's how I chose it. As a noob, there seemed to be nothing wrong with it.
I'm still not sure what I did wrong when I chose fosstodon as an instance, that could have been avoided so that I wouldn't have lost all that data. And, from there, I don't know whether I've just made the same mistake again.
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Yeah, it is very frustrating that there's no way to know what followers you've lost. The whole thing is frustrating!
And fosstodon probably was listed on instance directories. It really is a dilemma for new people ... when I look at joinmastodon.org's directory it includes some instances that are widely blocked, but for people who don't know about instance catalogs there's no way to discover this. Recently I've seen several people referring to a post that one of fosstodon's admin apparently made about pronouns back in 2019, but that's not the kind of thing a newcomer could discover. Similarly unless you're following the right people, there's almost no trace of the English-only incident, the incident where they clarified that it violated their code of conduct, refer to a white supremacist as a Nazi, or the incidents related to anti-PoC and anti-LGBTQ+ moderation.
Specifically with Fosstodon, one tip-off of potential problems at the time you signed up was the "no politics" rule in the CoC. Rules like that (even when they're well-intentioned) are in practice racist and anti-trans. But even there, it's not like the CoC specifically said "we're racist and anti-trans;" you'd have to read it closely and realize the implications of the rule. And there are plenty of problematic instances wehre the rules are fine, they're just not enforced (or enforced discsriminatorily), so while that might have worked here, it's not a magic bullet.
