Dear @QOTO , I'm an academic and as such I try to stay on the watch about what other academics are doing. I am generally convinced that qoto.org is an outstanding platform to do that.
Recently, I've had 3 instances of not being able to follow people on scholar.social which makes me think there's been some sort of defederation between the two instances.
Having quickly examined the local feeds of the two instances, I can imagine that there are some cultural differences between the way these instances are administered. However, from some accounts I am aware of on both instances, I believe both have positive and well intended communities.
I wonder whether there's anything I, as a user, could do to help resolve any possible issues with defederation? In general, what are the organisational mechanisms behind such collective processes? What are the possibilities for mitigation, mediation or whatever?
And last, but not least, is there a mechanism to verify my assumption that this is an issue about defederation?
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@QOTO @mapto So our history with scholar is sadly a negative one, and it is in fact how QOTO came into existance very many years back. I'll give you the back story.
QOTO at the time was a single user instance or close to it. This was in the days of block-gab where servers were blocking gab and as "punishment" anyone who didnt block gab would often be blocked for not blocking gab. At the time at QOTO we held a public debate on our public forum as to what people wanted to do. Most of the server wanted to block gab but we had a small and growing group of LGBTQ+ activists who very vocally opposed it.
These activitsts, I find out, had recently migrated over from several servers int he fediverse (though a large part of the group were from scholar.social). They had fled other servers who were blocking gab for us because we seemed the most anti-hate speech that still allowed free federation. They were part of a group of people from the LGBTQ+ community who actively monitored accounts on GAB for doxxing and threats tot heir community nd then would disseminate that information to the wider community to help save lives.
The debate went on for some days with several alternative approaches being proposed (like RSS readers etc) but all of them were rejected for several reason, most of those reasons fell into one of a few categories, namely that it would either expose their ip address or other personal details, or it might put them at risk in some other ways. I wont go over every detail here but sufficive to say the conclusion was to priotitize the LGBTQ+ community's safety. We went on to implement several features (such as subscriptions) that would allow them to be even safer, and ultimately decided to maintain a fairly open federation policy with rather strict on-server rules.
After we officially made our stance clear that we would remain with open-federation and be a safe heaven for LGBTQ+ people in that regard the word spread around the fedi. Overnight we went from a single user instance to the center of the fediverse with people flocking in from all over in huge numbers. One of the servers most impacted by this was scholar.social as part of the huge exodus. This is because at the time Scholar.social took an abusive approach to their own LGBTQ+ community that argued against the defederation and ultimately migrated to QOTO. At first the admin of the system was just outright suspending users, often making up really nasty lies. This wasnt really good look at just accelerated the community leaving from scholar. Ultimately scholar wound up blocking our server entirely both as a punishment to the people leaving scholar, and because when you block a server people cant migrate accounts to it anymore. He even went so far as to block my account on scholar and started spreading lies.
In recent years we found scholar to be a very radicalized server so i am somewhat happy for the block in that sense. For example a few years back several of their users started promoting violance, and actively made posts calling people to be violent. May servers around the fediverse started blocking scholar, and the admin at first justified the violence, but after about 2 days of scholar getting on block lists he silently finally removed the post. So his violent extremist would have been enough to get a block on our end probably if we werent already defederated.
That said, yes your welcome to reach out to the admin of scholar and encourage him to remove the defederation, it is entirely on their end. But many **MANY** people have asked him to do that before, he usually just suspends such people. In fact in the past he has suspended people from his server simply for someone holding an account here at all. So you may get blocked if you do that.
Not really a bad batch, some good people came from there. Their problem is their admin, he lies constantly about people and is very toxic, its kinda vile. But hey, the people arent all bad from the server at all.
