Romaq @Romaq@qoto.org

@JeremyLittau Admins deciding what is "safe" for their users (which is very unsafe, by the way) is what creates silos. If a site's admins habitually defederate sites they don't like, then a silo is the result, by definition.

weirder.earth is an example of a Mastodon site that turned into a silo. They block so many peers, some of their users now can't connect to most of their friends.

This is why I believe blocking should be done at the user level only, with the help of opt-in blocklists.

Butt god twerked for your sins.

I can't help but notice many toots from helpful newbies encouraging you to support the Mastodon Patreon.

It's fine to do that but understand it goes to just two big instances and the official Mastodon dev team.

It does NOT trickle down to YOUR instance. If you want to support your server, donate to it directly. Nearly all the costs of the explosive growth of the past few weeks is borne by local instances.

Mastodon is decentralized. There is no Mastodon Inc. This is not Twitter.

funny how this guy accuses me of harassment and doesnt bother to actually give a screenshot or a post... either way I do feel deeply sadened he feels this way and apologize.

That said I went through my entire search history, literally every interaction I ever had with him. Literally all of it is overwhelming examples of me supporting him and being nice and doing everything I could to be kind and welcoming to him... not one exmaple of nastiness. Here are tthe examples:

https://qoto.org/@freemo/103611927414971482

https://qoto.org/@freemo/103875635455378427

https://qoto.org/@freemo/103540475812695955

https://qoto.org/@freemo/103755299304947793

https://qoto.org/@freemo/103895288785997479

https://qoto.org/@freemo/103687371610964915

I could literally list 100 more positive interactions of me reaching out trying to be nice and supportive and cant find a single one of me "attacking" him.

No reports, no issues of harassment, just me flooding him with niceness and one day I find us blocked.

I mentioned this in a private message to someone recently about why a small handful of servers block qoto. I wanted to reiterate it here for the new comers on QOTO who dont know the history:

So there are some servers out there that demand every server int he network block every instance they do, and if a server doesnt block an instance they block then they block you in rettatliation.

Their reason for this is quite flawed but it goes like this.. If we federate with a bad actor instance and we boost one of their posts then their users will see it and defeat the purpose of the block. The problem is, this isnt how it actually works. If they block a server and we boost it, they wont see the boost, thats how blocks work.

The issue becomes even more complicated when you consider the fact that these servers, by virtue of their policy, have huge block lists where they block tons of major servers. So in order to satisfy them we too would have to block a huge number of servers.

This means you have a choice, you either join a server that isnt blocked, but has a huge block list themselves, or, you join a server that doesnt block and be blocked by a small handful of servers. Obviously that means on QOTO you will have bigger view of the world than you would on any of these others servers. In fact QOTO has onne of the largest federation footprints of any server in the network.

I want to also explain why we choose the decision we did. Years ago when this controversy started and servers across the fediverse started blocking there was a divide of people taking sides. WOTO was one of the few servers that didnt take sides and allowed people read content from any server (but with strict hate speech rules). This caused a huge influx of people,s pecifically from the LGBTQ community, onto our server. It turns out many people relied on us not-blocking for their physical safety. There were big name biggots (like milo yanappolus) who were on the network. They used their accounts here to watch his account for doxing so they could warn themselves and their community and protect themselves accordingly. In fact we added a feature just for them called subscriptions which allowed them to monitor accounts without following them so they could do so anonymously.

In tthe end for the safety of the LGBTQ community here we refused to engage in mass server blocking and instead encouraged our users to block servers on an individual basis and provided access to block lists for them to do so. But some really misguided servers blocked us anyway.

Thankfully the servers blocking us are few and far between and are limited to only the most excessive and aggressive block lists. As I said, QOTO has one of the largest federation footprints on the fediverse,

#mastoadmin