The popular Mastodon server Hachyderm.io has defederated with Threads. They have a long post with their reasoning:
Threads’ recent changes in their moderation policies, both what they’ve put in and what they’ve taken out (read the diff), puts their moderation practices in direct conflict with ours. Essentially, Threads may indeed be large enough that many users are just looking to exist somewhere on social media and are not necessarily de facto fans of Mark Zuckerberg et al, but we anticipate these changes to moderation will shift the user base of Threads in a way that is damaging to the Hachyderm community, so we are defederating from them before that can occur.
A couple thoughts on this:
- Hachyderm’s data shows that they’ve had only one report from their community against a user on Threads, while they’ve had hundreds for popular servers like Mastodon.social. Therefore from the data alone, it’s premature to defederate. The decision is clearly based on perceived future risk.
- Even though I’ve blogged about my disagreement with Meta’s new approach to content moderation, I don’t think defederating is the answer. It makes a decision for thousands of users, cutting them off from following Threads accounts, rather than letting each user decide if they want to opt out. It makes the fediverse worse and more disjointed, in my opinion.
The culture of Mastodon is built around community servers. This model works best for small servers. When you have large servers like Mastodon.social or Hachyderm.io (or, at a huge scale, Threads.net itself) you will have a more diverse set of users and it becomes harder to make decisions that affect everyone.
But Mastodon users can just migrate between servers, right? To find a server that more closely aligns with what they want to see on the fediverse? Sort of. You can move your followers, but there is still no way to move your posts between Mastodon servers that I’m aware of. (Micro.blog has both follower migration and posts import from Mastodon.)
The social web is evolving quickly and I see a need for many types of platforms: small and medium-sized community servers running Mastodon, larger platforms like Bluesky with their own take on content filtering, and IndieWeb-friendly platforms where each fediverse user has their own domain name rather than a domain shared with the community. There’s a place for all of these things.
If there’s pushback against the Hachyderm decision — and there might not be — it will be because the server has too many users to be managed as if it’s a small community server. According to FediDB, Hachyderm has nearly 10k active users and 55k total users, putting it in the top 30 fediverse servers.
Larger platforms create new problems. Massive, centralized platforms have even more problems, inherent in their scale. The web is generally better when it’s more distributed. That means more, smaller servers. Perhaps the future of Hachyderm is to embrace being small.
