The official Mastodon account¹ is currently hosted on fosstodon.org. This instance (server) has a very bad reputation for failing to moderate its users, resulting in a lot of harassment coming from it. They are blocked by a lot of instances. I suggest moving the account to another instance. Possible candidates are <https://floss.social/> or <https://mastodon.technology/>. The last post from the account is from 2019-09-02, not even news articles from <https://www.gentoo.org/news/> are posted. After the account got complaints about malformed content² and Twitter links³, the posting stopped entirely. I'm available to manage the account on another instance, if there is interest. ¹ <https://fosstodon.org/@gentoo> ² <https://bugs.gentoo.org/692702> ³ <https://fosstodon.org/@gentoo/102720753001596235> Reproducible: Always
With the implosion of Twitter now in progress resulting in the popularity and visibility of Mastodon growing drastically, it's more important than ever for Gentoo to have a presence on Mastodon. Can we revive this issue and get Gentoo a decent, reputable home on Mastodon?
Could someone share a bit more information for those of us who don't know much about Mastodon? Particularly: 1. Could you link some evidence as to the problems with fosstodon.org? I'm not arguing, I just want to see it for myself that "they are blocked". 2. FWICS mastodon.technology is being closed now. floss.social I don't seem to be able to find on https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers. Why? 3. Is it considered an acceptable practice to cross-post to both Twitter and some Mastodon instance? I'm also asking for myself, as I'm considering the move and I think it makes most sense for me to move wherever Gentoo moves.
(In reply to Michał Górny from comment #2) > Could someone share a bit more information for those of us who don't know > much about Mastodon? > > Particularly: > > 1. Could you link some evidence as to the problems with fosstodon.org? I'm > not arguing, I just want to see it for myself that "they are blocked". It's very hard to get a representative picture of instance blocks. Someone made a list of the 500 most blocked instances[1]: 13 have it suspended (completely blocked), 4 have it silenced (posts are only visible to followers) and 8 have it limited (not sure what it means, maybe media is not shown?). I don't know what block lists were used as input. It looks like it is less blocked now than before. I know some instance moderators have unblocked it, because there are so many people on it that users want to follow. A big problem with fosstodon was always that a lot of its users were replying to random people with unsolicited Linux advice and nitpickery (“It's GNU/Linux!”, “Wouldn't have happened with Linux!”, …) and were quite aggressive about that. 2-3 years ago the moderators didn't do anything about that. I can't judge how the situation is today. It seems to have become better? The thing that was the final straw for many was a post by one of the admins, calling people who called out harassment “snowflakes”, and reiterating it in a blog post. That was over 3 years ago, both posts are long deleted. > 2. FWICS mastodon.technology is being closed now. floss.social I don't seem > to be able to find on https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers. Why? The list is curated manually and no one knows what criteria are used. A more complete list is at <https://instances.social/>. > 3. Is it considered an acceptable practice to cross-post to both Twitter and > some Mastodon instance? Most people are okay with it if replies and mentions aren't cross-posted and when the account reacts to replies (and not just uses the account for one-way communication). [1] <https://gist.github.com/yetzt/32c754fbe87009f8c161f40541147c70#file-defederated-instances-tsv-L353>
Correlating the defederated instance list with the instances having most users doesn't make fosstodon look that bad. That said, now I'm completely lost as to which instance to choose. This feels like XMPP all over again. Tons of servers to choose from, and no clue about their long-term reliability. By the way, that list has quite a lot of servers that are DOWN yet have 100% uptime...
I support moving to another instance, since it's really easy to change the server in Mastodon. Account on a blocklisted server is not really useful. Also I propose creating a "group" with a bot[0] so Gentoo people can find each other. (I know that Mastodon 4.0 supports subscribing to hashtags, but groups have wider federation reach) [0]: https://github.com/uanet-exception/fedigroup.py
