Threads is blocking servers on the Fediverse. Here's how we unblocked ourselves.
soapbox.pub> It's very common on Mastodon to block servers with a heavy hand, with huge blocklists such as "Fediblock" naming nearly every server on the network. This is a big problem, because it creates a fragmented network where people cannot communicate with each other.
This "problem" is actually a feature. The requirement that everyone must be able to communicate with one another is a fallacy.
An admin of an instance has a right to block any server they wish to block, just as a user of that instance has a right to move to another one if their instance's administration policy doesn't suit them. This includes Threads, since it decides to become one of the many other instances on the Fediverse.
> goes against the open nature of the Fediverse
The nature of the Fediverse is that it is decentralized and that you, as an instance administrator, own your instance, with all the ups and downs of that fact. Who are you to impose your own limitations upon owners of other instances and tell them what they should or shouldn't do with their own hardware and their own software?
This system solves the "safe space problem" and the "free speech problem" at the same time if only both sides could recognize it.
It's on the users to recognize and define the distinction between safe space and free speech - unlike on other platforms, where it's the global moderators' job.
This seems fair, unless these blocklists are used to bully neutral servers into adopting your blocklist?
Let's say there's a federation of bully admins who dislike Server Wrongthink. There's a moderate server Moderate which they're federated with, but Moderate does not block Wrongthink.
In this scenario, will Moderate get blocked too? Or only Wrongthink?
You calling them "bully" implies that they should not have a right to federate only with instances that they consider federation-worthy. Who are you to tell them what they ought to do with their own instances?
Also, the problem you describe is a social problem. You can't solve those with technology, as they say around HN.
But they are acting as bullies, both in the hypothetical example, and in several real-life cases. If a hypothetical right involves causing harm to others, maybe it's not the right one first suggested.
Them being "bullies", whatever is meant by "bullying" in this context, doesn't deprive them of their right to own their instances or align with administrators with similar moderation policies. Fediverse is literally built on the idea that people own their instances and therefore all own the choices they make that affect these instances, just as you own the choice to call their flocking behavior "bullying".
Or, in other words, what are you expecting? It's their hardware and their software. If one pays for hosting, and owns the software, then - unlike you or me - they're entitled to do as they wish with their stuff and to bear the consequences of any moral judgments they make. Which is the same as Twitter, same as Threads, same as Bluesky, just on a smaller and more interconnected scale.
A lot of people would say I'm transgressing my bounds if I try to use the influence I gained by paying for my server to threaten you into changing what content your server serves to your users. That's the essence of "block X or I'll block you."
And? They have a right to do so. In particular, they have a right to defederate any server for any reasons - which includes mine, yours, or this other person's, with or without asking things like "block X or I'll block you".
Isn't that a bit like saying a gold prospector has a right to shoot anybody in the whole Wild West, all because he can?
Equating murder, even attempted, with defederation - this is a fallacy.
The only way for the analogy to hold no water at all would be for bans and deceleration to not harm anyone; that's not true in many cases.
I think that a better analogy would be: if someone shows up at your doorstep, you are free to not let them in.
> Threads must moderate users, not servers
Why does threads have to do that? Server blocks are incredibly common in the fediverse and last time this came up as a complaint people defended this religiously as being just how stuff works. The server I'm on has an incredibly large blocklist and it's not even entirely clear what it blocks given that half the blocks themselves are censored: https://hachyderm.io/about
This is exactly what one would expect to find if the fediverse can't agree on shared rules.
I think the issues with server blocks are mainly related to the way administrators use them to settle personal beefs or play a nuclear negotiation game with other admins who they want to impose their moderation policies on. "Moderate my way or you'll all be defederated."
Mastodon administrators aren't "faceless corporations," they are people with as many personality flaws and weaknesses as your coworkers or any other group of techies you didn't get to choose to work with. Some of them are Machiavellian narcissists, who want to decide how the entire network functions - and they're not afraid to use their ability to sever social connections with unaware users as a negotiating tool.
> Moderate my way or you'll all be defederated.
And it's a feature, too. The users trust their administration team with their presence on a given instance and actually defer their moderation choices to them - something that's impossible on other, centralized platforms. If a moderator of an instance serves the moderation wishes of the users of that instance, and everyone on that instance is happy, then what's the problem?
You might be imagining a server full of spam and Nazis, totally unmoderated except for compliance with basic laws, when you think of a server block. I am talking about a case such as where an admin had an argument with one user on another server and then blocked the entire server as a negotiation tactic to force the user's admin to ban them. The users on the Machiavellian admin's server didn't know this was happening because server blocks show up in the form of mysterious disappeances of some of your friends.
The free market argument for the belief that everything an admin does is necessarily good if they still have any users left after they do it is flawed, because users do not know all that much about what their admins are doing, and don't have a way of knowing whether a server they're thinking about switching to is better or worse.
You can imagine all kinds of scenarios, but it comes down to "are users of server X forced to handle content from server Y". It can be both good and bad, but either way the Fediverse chose "no".
If the reason for "not forcing them to handle content from server Y" is that the admin of server X had a name calling spat with an individual user on server X, the fact that the fediverse makes instance admins into miniature dukes and dutchesses, complete with wars and Honor, is an unalloyed pain. ;-)
Again it doesn't really matter because it's just the way it works, but it's also a feature for server admins. Imagine being harassed by someone, or imagine that person harassing your users, blah blah blah. Is there some hypothetical where this feature is abused in a super petty way? Sure. Welcome to all features in all software.
Let's take a gun as an example. You could use it to shoot a bad guy, but there are a lot of times where the person who got shot was a good guy, and a lot of other times it's by accident. The same goes for moderation - you can justify handing out the power to cut off connections between entire communities to random people by thinking of the ways it could be used for good but it doesn't get you out of dealing with the ways it can be used to harm.
You could say the exact same thing if federation could be forced. You can make whatever facile analogy you want; my point has always been there's bad scenarios no matter what.
No, I'm imagining arbitrary servers. The admin's right to block a server still stands even over petty arguments like that, and it's the whole instance that will get to bear the consequences, with the admin being the one responsible for the block and the users being responsible for trusting that instance's administration team. That's the trust that Fediverse is actually built upon - everything else flows from there.
I'm not saying that everything an admin does is necessarily good if they have users left. I'm saying that if a user disagrees with something their admin does, they're free to reach out and dispute it, or switch instances. Some users won't notice, others won't care - but if they don't notice and don't care, then there's no problem to solve.
"If you don't like it, you can leave," is an argument with limited effectiveness. First, unless users spend a lot of time talking about servers, they won't know where to leave to. Remember the great migration, where we were all saying it didn't matter which server you picked because they all federated? It turns out it does, and they don't - and all the new users who were anxious about joining the "right community" were right!
Furthermore, if users did spend a lot of time talking about their admin's moderation, I guarantee it would come in the form of a lot of complaining, maybe even entitled-sounding complaining, without much deference to the admin's right to do what they want on the server they are, admittedly, paying for. There is no way for the community to figure out who's servers are good to be on without continually hashing out who is doing a good job, which means, in some cases, disapproving.
As for contacting your admin to say you think they're being petty... That is not likely to work! You'd probably just get yourself banned before having a chance to migrate your followers!
> First, unless users spend a lot of time talking about servers, they won't know where to leave to.
You can literally see everyone's instance right next to their name on most Fediverse clients - I'm Michał "phoe" Herda, but also @phoe@functional.cafe, which already gives people one more possibility to choose from as long as they see my posts pop up. Then, there's some independent instance browsers, and, finally, you can just ask a #question in a public post and ask for boosts.
> As for contacting your admin to say you think they're being petty... Do you think that would work?
Yes. I'm a mod on functional.cafe, we've had a few instances of our users contacting us with moderation questions and we've asked our users for feedback several times as well, and we've managed to resolve them to almost everyone's enjoyment. I'll probably repeat - if you can't trust your instance admin, then it's on you. There's no higher authority to appeal to, so quite literally the only option is "if you don't like it, you can leave", except you have hundreds of choices with distinct moderation policies.
It's the same as with great migration - if you ended up on an instance that doesn't resonate with you, then hopping to another one is even cheaper than it used to be (with the new "account moved to" feature that, AFAIR, wasn't there during the great migration).
Finding a good instance that suits you well isn't exactly cheap; you're not a product, meaning there's no one who makes money on you always having a good initial experience. That's the cost associated with the meaning of you being a person, not a product - you need to find your place in society, and there are instances as generalist, specialized, bland, and wicked as you can imagine for you to choose from.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said finding a server with rational administration is not cheap. The competition - for those who can tolerate one-liner Twitter culture - is free.
> finding a server with rational administration is not cheap
Sure it is: choose the server everyone else chose. We know exactly how all this stuff works out because we already hashed it out with email. Everyone will just use the equivalent of Gmail and you'll have to do what they say or they won't deliver your emails/posts.
Nilay Patel was right when he said the essential product of social media is content moderation (or a spam filter, whatever you want to call it). Some service will come along and say "we filter out 100% of the stuff 80% of you don't want" and that'll be that. Services/protocols that don't facilitate that will be replaced by those that do. Maybe it's hard to see now, but we're in the "overthrow our tyrannical overlords" phase of the internet cycle. Next up is "please someone make this safe/usable for mere mortals". Centralization etc. is a red herring.
Your claim that Twitter has rational administration is a very bold one. (Which accidentally strengthens your confirmation of me "hitting the nail on the head".)
I was thinking of Bluesky when I said that, but it was true for Twitter for the use of the word rational I am talking about (keeping personal beefs out of it and at least trying to be impartial). Elon Musk has since made himself, and X, the perfect example of an instance admin on a power trip! That's a good analogy, actually. You might be on a moderation team with sensible feedback policies but the odds are very high of a new user ending up on the property, and following the rules, of a miniature Elon.
I'm curious what Bluesky is going to evolve into, truth be told, especially once it begins to federate. It's privately owned, and as X has demonstrated, there is no admin that will allow technology to get in the way of the power trips they end up having, but Fediverse at least minimizes this damage due to its "defederate-and-move-on" architecture.
Jack Dorsey has a history of letting commercial interests stay in front of his share in the universal human flaw of power tripping, which is not exactly a complement but does imply Bluesky will end up mostly like Twitter did.
I hope this is correct, but as always, we'll see. There can always be some sort of a Musk to buy it off Dorsey in a year or three.
The complaint by the author that Meta should moderate individual users rather than simply block "loosely moderated" servers feels like an unreasonable expectation.
Exactly; one of the most valuable things federation brings to the table is the ability to choose which servers to federate with and which not to. I don't want Meta moderating individual users on sites they don't own.
The "moderation" line for e-mail has been drawn at spam/hacking/phishing. If the fediverse succeeds, then it will do the same. Servers that fail to police spam/hacking/phishing will be blocked, everything else will be allowed. If the lines are drawn elsewhere, each server will choose their own lines, there will be no agreement, and thus no ability to share blocklists, and the fediverse will be in name only.
There is a very good reason to see this path being taken, given what the Apple App Store disallows and new EU law with rigid speech requirements.
I suppose it fits with the rest of this article being rather disingenuous. Alex Gleason, Spinster and Neenster are part of a controversial group that detractors call "trans-exclusionary radical feminism." For better or for worse (the details of this controversy are not necessarily relevant), instances of that nature (and pretty much anything that runs on Soapbox) are defederated by a lot of Fediverse servers, and it seems that Meta for one reason or another has joined those servers. Gleason is well aware of this controversy.
My best guess is that Meta hopes to make itself appear more palatable to mainstream Mastodon servers by also defederating.
>Meta seems to be betting on the fact that people have played nicely in the past, but I for one am not going to let them have their way. I am going to ensure the data they publish remains free and open to all.
is there a name for this behavior? 'in-your-face-ism?' Choosing who to federate with is an explicit feature of federation. It's precisely what a lot of servers wanted to do with traffic from Threads, and they should have the ability to.
There's an increasing number of people in social communities who seemingly want to have a right to not just have their own space, but insert themselves into spaces of people who have kicked them out, or don't want anything to do with them.
Exactly.
The principle of free association isn't just anyone should be able to associate with those that feel the same way, it's also that people shouldn't have to with those they don't.
It's an odd omission that the "feminist server" mentioned is actually a gathering place for TERFs, after they were banned from places like Reddit. If your community is problematic enough to be kicked off of Reddit, I can imagine your users/content may not be desirable to Meta/Threads' brand, either.
The banned subreddits are archived here, they weren't particularly problematic, but the 'TERF' viewpoints they expressed angered the people-of-gender in the Reddit admin team so much that they decided to ban the whole lot: https://www.itsafetish.org/archives/gendercritical
It's unfortunate because there was often a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion there that hasn't quite been replicated on its successor, Ovarit.
Makes sense considering he is staunchly anti-trans https://web.archive.org/web/20220726042921/https://blog.alex...
He was also previously the head of engineering of the Trump-related social network Truth Social.
He also [worked on Poast](https://www.dailydot.com/debug/truth-social-poast-donald-tru...), which is a social network for neo-nazis and a direct successor to Kiwi Farms.
Steer clear of it.
Meh tbh reddit bans everyone now, it's not the place it once was where if you're banned on reddit you have to be particularly bad. People have been banned for liking a president, it's not like that's some fringe ideology. Banning feminists for thinking feminism is for females is pretty heavy handed.
The author's baseless accusations wrapped in snark sounds incredibly petty.
Given this is how the instance admin handles defederation, preemptive defederation of this network makes sense.
Honestly this blog is one of the most entitled posts I’ve seen in a while.
I think it's probably a pretty bad idea to publish someone's stuff (content on threads) somewhere they don't want it published (a shitposting server). Feels like a TOS or copyright violation, if not just rude.
Lots of instances block Threads too. That's how it works.
In case the author doesn't know or willfully didn't post the reason Spinster is banned both on Threads and Mastadon; the server is a safe haven for TERFs who co-opt feminism as the cover for open seething transphobia disguised as criticism when communicating to a wider audience. Credit where it's due they're much smarter than your typical bigots and know how to hide it better to avoid bans.
The fact that the OP is out here defending them as just feminists is the a sign it's working. There is nothing in feminist thought that would earn them a ban on any major social network that isn't that "gender critical" nonsense.
Whether or not you agree with the position or not Threads calls what they do hate speech and so defederating makes total sense from their perspective.
The author of this was the head of engineering at Truth Social: https://www.reuters.com/technology/head-engineering-trumps-t.... He also runs/ran several "GC" focused instances, and worked at Gab (the "alt-right" social media that rebased itself on Mastodon). This is an intentionally vague post by someone with a bad history, trying to play cover for instances that Meta obviously doesn't want to associate with.
Welp that answers that I guess.
I do feel bad for these women who for whatever reason hate trans people so much they align themselves with groups that will throw them under the bus the instant they stop being useful.
That part actually confused me, because TERFs don't usually bother Meta. Here is a sample post that they showed the admin of neuromatch.social (on his Instagram, as an ad for Threads): https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111633121548703898 An unsympathetic test case, but it made me wonder if I missed something else going on.
"TERF" is just the newest slur anti-feminists came up with to further the evil feminist trope. Anyone who looks into the conflict between feminism and the transgender movement can see that the so-called "TERFs" are the ones on the side of common sense, fairness, and universal anti-discrimination principles.
Thanks for this, and the other people responding with the TERF info.
They don't "co-opt feminism", they are feminists - the radical kind. Which is essentially about about recognising and removing male dominance over women, in all contexts.
some of these people might do to read instagram/threads TOS before complaining about suppression of speech
Why? They aren’t legally binding. No reasonable person thinks they are.
Isn't the entire point of the fediverse that users and admins can block entire servers to create a curated experience? Why does this author hate the open internet?
Just a heads up, the creator and maintainer, Alex Gleason, of Soapbox (or Rebased as it was called) is [anti-trans](https://web.archive.org/web/20220726042921/https://blog.alex...) and was previously the [head of engineering](https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4102527-top-exec-at-tr...) of the Trump-related social network (Truth Social)
He also [worked on Poast](https://www.dailydot.com/debug/truth-social-poast-donald-tru...), which was a social network for neo-nazis and a direct successor to Kiwi Farms.
Steer clear of it.
Threads will probably switch from a blacklist to a whitelist soon.
Can imagine the shit show if Threads tried to avoid instances blocking them.
They really don't know how to do it:
By default a curated view which probably group-minimizes the posts, unless the user decides to go uncurated.
One could think of categories of curation, levels, etc (AI could understand sarcasm).
No need to shadow ban or ban full servers, just group curated-out content and always let the user decides, unless the account was adult gated with adult temporal wallet code (there will be a black market ofc, but if control is done properly, that should stay anecdotal).