Notices by Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)

Time to talk about Fediblock 🥳

This is a topic that fills my heart with joy and cheer -- and no doubt yours as well -- because it's never controversial, never gets anyone upset, and makes us all do a happy dance!

Oh, who am I kidding? Fediblock sucks. But it's an absolute necessity. Before I begin, let me acknowledge this is my personal opinion. It is not representative of https://calckey.social.

There's a lot of bad servers out there dedicated to making people miserable. It's simply not an option to federate with those servers simply because they compromise community safety.

So what are those bad servers?

Here's the rub. Publicizing a Fediblock list, and reasons for a server ending up on Fediblock, is also a bad idea as it attracts negative attention, and attempts by trolls to override the Fediblock. And then we get into an arms race -- which becomes a time suck.

That said, I fully acknowledge that servers can change, and that it's worth periodically reviewing which servers are on our Fedblock list. What's more, as admins, we can also acknowledge that conditions can change -- due to the Fediverse itself changing.

The most front-of-mind aspect of what arrives on Fediblock is, of course, community safety. When in doubt, lean towards safety at all times (within reason).

On this server, the admin team will be reviewing what's on our Fediblock list. I imagine not much will change, but we may re-visit the status of a few servers.

Deciding which servers to federate with isn't an easy decision, but it's something we take very seriously.

There’s only two things that will cause Mastodon to do a U-turn on defaulting to mastodon.social:

1. Social pressure
2. Competitive pressure

Mastodon has no social pressure to do a U-turn. In fact, they’re being applauded for it. The Press and certain tech influencers are telling them that they made a “brave” step.

So now it’s time for Mastodon gGmbh to feel competitive pressure.

They’re not the only game in town, and the Fediverse has options.

The event that made me leave mastodon.social was the decision by Mastodon gGmbh to make that the default server for new registrations.

Rather than shrug and ask, “What can we do?”—and do nothing—I realized that this is the Fediverse. I’ve got options.

I don’t have to be part of any server that gives me the “No!” feeling.

Despite being a member of mastodon.social for 5 years, and donating money to the project, I think it’s going in the wrong direction.

“But Chris, what about growth?” Some have said.

If growth comes at the expense of decentralization, I don’t want growth.

“But Chris, people don’t care about decentralization!”

Then we’ll make them care. If they don’t care now, they’ll care tomorrow.

And we’ll do this by making decentralized social media that’s so good, you’ll never go back to Big Social.

We can’t compromise on this aspect. I don’t care what certain folks say, you can’t achieve decentralization through centralization.

Some people call this idealism.

If so, this idealist took the practical step up leaving mastodon.social.

Let me be clear, I have no bone to pick with individual Mastodon servers. We are on the same team.

But let me suggest this: without post importing, it will be very hard to convince mastodon.social users to migrate away from that server.

My own stance: no one will migrate from mastodon.social unless:

1. Migration has minimal friction
2. The other server has tangible benefits over their current one

What I mean to say is that it’s time to make it easy and compelling to leave mastodon.social.

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems Mastodon is the serious app. Calckey is the fun app—the one where people do fun things for fun reasons.

Eventually, there may be a more serious fork of Calckey 😉