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?
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?
Also, the problem you describe is a social problem. You can't solve those with technology, as they say around HN.
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.
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.
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?
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.
My best guess is that Meta hopes to make itself appear more palatable to mainstream Mastodon servers by also defederating.
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.
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 unfortunate because there was often a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion there that hasn't quite been replicated on its successor, Ovarit.
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.
Given this is how the instance admin handles defederation, preemptive defederation of this network makes sense.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.