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.
Daniel Rose this good stuff. I really appreciate the balance you call for here.
Pratik Ha! Coincindentally we made similar posts but yeah, I agree with your general sentiment that it harms ordinary non-plugged-in users more than it sends a message to Meta.
Torb @manton I lost ability to follow a (queer) friend there (I’m on hachydetm)., but I ultimately think they made the right call. Hachyderm is a tech instance focused on making it a harassment free place for minorities. Any Facebook owned social will be increasingly unsafe for minorities.
Chris Messina "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."
I don't think it's self-evident that smaller servers are always better. Looking at how human populations organize themselves - whether in cities, towns, states, or nations - we see different structures emerging that enable various levels of organizational complexity.
In today's social web, people seek spaces to establish their digital identity and presence. What's happening with Threads and Meta illustrates this: at the scale of hundreds of millions of users, we need smaller subsections (like groups) and community architectures that enable localized rules and moderation decisions. Community Notes is one mechanism that scales, though not doesn't necessarily lead to coherence or cohesion.
When moderation decisions affect hundreds of millions of users without proper systems of adjudication, justice, or representative governance, you inevitably create widespread frustration, particularly directed at platform administrators. While I share concerns about Meta's direction, we should be pragmatic about how the social web is maturing and along with a need for varied governance structures. We should pursue interoperability to prevent digital Berlin Walls that keep people separated unnecessarily.
So while small and distributed systems are crucial for innovation and preserving long-term choice and freedom, I can't agree that small is inherently superior in all cases.
Manton Reece @manualdousuario My point with the "makes a decision" is that big decisions have consequences. Let's say X did federate, fully, unlike the opt-in Threads federation. X would then be 95% of the fediverse. Do we really want the fediverse split into incompatible pieces? I'm not sure.
skoo.bz Curious question concerning our federated instance on micro.blog. Is it or will it be possible to block a user?
Manton Reece @chrismessina These are great points. Maybe what I should have emphasized is that smaller servers (and web identity that isn't tied to a huge platform) can give users more control. I strongly agree about interoperability and walls, though.
Manton Reece @skoobz Yes, you can block a user now, on the Account page check out Edit Muted and Blocked Users. You can also mute whole other servers.
skoo.bz Thanks for the tip and the feature.
