See also:
As described in the Terms of Service, I reserve the right to Silence or Suspend (“block”) other fediverse instances at my discretion. Here are some further explanations for what that means, and how it works in practice.
Essentially, “federation” refers to the process by which this Hometown/Mastodon server interacts with other servers on the wider “fediverse.”
To quote Mastodon’s own documentation:
Federation is a form of decentralization. Instead of a single central service that all people use, there are multiple services, that any number of people can use. A Mastodon website can operate alone. Just like a traditional website, people sign up on it, post messages, upload pictures and talk to each other. Unlike a traditional website, Mastodon websites can interoperate, letting their users communicate with each other; just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to someone from Outlook, Fastmail, Protonmail, or any other email provider, as long as you know their email address, you can mention or message anyone on any website using their address.
The term “defederation” describes a number of measures that admins can take to restrict or block another instance from interacting with their instance. This is commonly done to provide a better experience for users by blocking instances run by bad actors, with lax moderation policies, or that they prefer not to interact with for any number of other reasons.
Here are some of the actions I am able to take as the admin to limit entire instances from interacting with labyrinth.social.
“Suspending” an instance (also referred to as Blocking) prevents that instance and its users from interacting with labyrinth.social in any way. Users from labyrinth.social and that suspended service can’t follow one another, and posts from that service can’t be viewed via labyrinth.social (and vice versa).
“Silencing” an instance (also referred to as Limiting) is a less severe form of defederation. It prevents posts from users on that instance from appearing in the public timeline visible on labyrinth.social (which also means those posts will not be visible in search results for hashtags). However, it does not prevent users of labyrinth.social from following or being followed by users of that instance or accessing posts from that instance in the labyrinth.social interface.
Rejecting Media is an additional step that can be taken, for a Silenced server, to prevent the images posted by users of that server from ever being delivered to or processed by labyrinth.social.
If you’re a logged in user of labyrinth.social, you can click here to see a list of all instances which have been subject to any of the aforementioned moderation actions. The list of moderated servers is not publicly available to non-users, but information may be available by request.
In order to provide the best possible experience for labyrinth.social, I periodically review the #FediBlock hashtag, which fediverse admins use to share recommendations of servers that other admins may wish to suspend or block. I also occasionally review a number of other publicly available resources which list recommendations for server blocks.
However, despite using these sources for convenience’s sake, labyrinth.social does not currently have any sort of automated subscription to an external blocklist, which means decisions are made on a case by case basis at the admin’s discretion.
In most cases the decision to block is fairly easy. I often Suspend an instance if that instance meets any of the following conditions:
In these cases, I do a quick check to ensure that there are no existing follow relationships between labyrinth.social users and users from those instances that I would be disrupting by suspending that instance. There virtually never are, but if there were, it would be reason to further the block, or to check in with the impacted users on labyrinth.social. Otherwise, I simply suspend without seeking further imput from the community or making any announcement.
I use the Silence feature more infrequently; Usually if an instance is causing problems then I will simply suspend it. However, sometimes large instances are not well moderated, and in these cases it may be useful to Silence the instance without severing follow relationships.
Occasionally, an instance may silenced or suspended on a temporary basis, if a situation is unfolding on that instance which is resulting in problematic behavior (usually automated spam messages). This has happened a few times. These temporary actions are always announced via the @admin account.
Users of labyrinth.social are of course welcome to inquire about any defederation decisions and request a reversal. This has never happened, but if it ever does, I will make the decision after seeking input from the community.
Users or admins of other instances who have been suspended are welcome to contact the admin to “appeal” the decision to defederate, but should not expect me to consider whether the decision to defederate was “fair” to their users. My goal is to provide the best possible experience for myself and the other labyrinth.social users, not to ensure that external parties are given “fair” access to the labyrinth.social users.
If a previous defederation decision is ever reversed, such a decision will be announced in advance via the @admin account.
The decision to defederate from an instance used by, say, a dozen nazis, is fairly simple. When considering a larger server, say, one with 100,000 users or more, whose primary problem is lax moderation, the decision is often more complicated.
For example, take the example of mastodon.social, the largest and most popular Mastodon instance. Naturally, it hosts many accounts that are of interest to labyrinth.social users. However, its moderation is not always satisfactory, and for that reason, some instance admins have chosen to suspend federation with it. This is something labyrinth.social does not currently intend to do, after weighing the risks of misconduct from that server against the fact the interests labyrinth.social’s users have in that server’s users.
As a counter example, take threads.net, the fediverse project created by the tech company Meta. A vocal contingent of fediverse admins have suspended federation with threads for a number of reasons, including privacy, content moderation, mistrust of Meta, and lack of interest in the content posted there. In contrast to the decision we made with mastodon.social, labyrinth.social has decided not to federate with Threads.
Both of the above decisions were made in consultation with the labyrinth.social users via the @admin account, and both are subject to change in the future. As a general rule, decisions relating to federation with large servers will be made that same way, with community input, although I reserve the right to make the final decision myself.