It’s been a while since I provided an instance update since a lot has happened. After our instance and our friends at Urusai social got attacked by alt-right trolls, I have to beef of moderation. We have some volunteers come up and help me with the moderation. The moderation team can be seen on the server rules page.
Additionally, we decided that signups will be require approval first before you can start using your account. This is meant to stop any trolls from creating accounts for nefarious purposes.
We decided not to restrict signup from VPNs since I understand a lot of people use them to protect their privacy. It will be hard to maintain the IP list and this would affect legitimate users more than bad actors. We may lift the approval requirement in the future, but it will stay for the time being. However, all burner emails are banned from signup since there they are often used for abuse
Existing users may generate invite links to allow their friends to join without needing approval first. Note that we do monitor signups and disable invite links if abused.
Instance Moderation Updates
As a result of trolls attacking our servers and dealing with false Fediblock reports, our instance moderation will become a bit strict in terms of silencing and defederating bad instances. While we won’t be as strict as Mastodon.art or Artisan.chat, but we will be close to. Since Mastodon is still missing moderation tools and limited moderation resources, we have to continue to focus on instance blocks.
To be blunt, we do not allow hate speech, harassment, extremist content, or illegal content on our instance. I may have mistyped or done a freudian slip, which I apologize for any misunderstandings in the attempt to defend our instance from false fediblock reports while being in a panic. If you read our posts on our instance’s local feed, you will see it’s completely clean. While we hid our block list because of the FBA bot that enable alt-right harassers to harass us from alt-accounts for blocking them, our block list has a little over 700 servers blocked or limited.
We will try not to defederate instances that has our users following them. That is if the administrator of that said instance just interacted with bad people on three different servers on the Fedinuke list. This is why “federates with the usual suspects” or “associates with the usual suspects” are often given as reasons. They are considered alt-fedi sites, mostly associates with the alt-right. Like with Alt-tech, Alt-fedi or alternate fediverse instances that either have inadequate/lax moderation or those whose admins/mods interact with people on the alt-right or far-right extremists.
Note, if they simply interacted with people on bad instances without realizing it and never have posted hate speech, extremist content or harass users, they will simply be silenced until they distance themselves from that server and implemented the Fedinuke (the bare minimum). This mostly applies to single user instances or those with very few people. If you don’t know how to apply these blocklists, you should probably not run your own instance and join any good instances out there.
Users on our instance may request to have an instance downgraded to limited if the content they post is mostly okay and it’s just bad interactions. We also realize some blocks are done without receipts or unjust, so we may remove it if they aren’t currently posting rule breaking content.
Why we do this? Once you start interacting with extremists, nazis, hateful people, and those on the alt-right, the possibility of you to start saying hate speech and harass others goes up drastically. I know this is a generalization and users might interact with them without realizing they are bad. However, given what we experienced in the past, we don’t want people from bad instances start spilling over and posting hateful stuff in the comment sections on our blogs, Youtube channels, etc.
To sum this perfectly from the Artisan.chat’s blog on this matter.
We monitor @fediblock@mastodon.art for any bad instances to place silence/defederation on. Note that we do check if the instance is block worthy before implementing it.
Lastly, posting false Fediblock reports against our instance and our users without credible evidence (reciepts, unaltered) is considered abuse (libel, which is illegal in most countries) and harassment. Users caught doing this will get their posts reported and banned from our side. We will also notify the offending instance’s administrators.
If the post is not removed in 48 hours, the instance might get silenced/defederated for false Fediblock report. Please note that most instances have rules against abusing the tag. The tag should only be used against instances that are posting hate speech, extremist content, or harassing people to comply with the Mastodon Covenant.
It’s another reason to move from a big instance like Mastodon Social/Online to our instance. We are well protected against trolls You can learn more on how to migrate your account to ours here.
The post Instance Updates – Apr 7, 2023 appeared first on Sakurajima.
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