Defederation

Defederation has come up in multiple different context recently in the fediverse. Even more so, the way other protocols are developing are setting up larger questions about future choices regarding federation as well. The current ongoing crypto spam wave has people talking about defederation as a tool to minimize the impact of the attack. The Mastodon server Universeodon has added the option for full search to their server for a few months now. This lead to the debate about search being resurfaced again, and people talking about defederation with servers who do not hold to community standards regarding search. Meanwhile, the rise of Bluesky and the ATprotocol raises questions that should be answered in the near future: do servers want to federate with Bluesky, and under which circumstances? The upcoming release of Meta's new microblogging server only complicates that question even further.

Crypto spam

The recent crypto spam wave started with mastodon.social, where the spammers mass created accounts on this server and used it to send private messages to users to advertise crypto coins. The server administrators tried to get it under control, but keeping up with the mass amount of bans that were needed turned out to be too much after the third wave. Mastodon.social finally caved and added a hCaptcha to new signups, to prevent automated signups. This moved the threat vector away from mastodon.social to different servers, as later mastodon.world, techhub.social and other instances got hit with the same spam attack.

The fediverse has historically had an understanding that defederation between servers is a solution if someone deems the other server to be a bad actor. This can be because they host nazis, or are responsible for spam. The common thinking is that if an admin is not acting responsible towards spam, that server should be defederated, or at least silenced.

During the start of the spam wave, this turned into a common talking points on the feeds, the core idea being that this was a failure on the side of Eugen Rochko. This criticism was co-joined with the criticism that the Mastodon organisation had set the mastodon.social as the default instance during the signup flow on the apps. While the frustrations are understandable and there are certainly valid criticisms on that decision, crypto spammers do not manually sign up via the official app, making it more of an airing of grievances than actual critique on the spam defense policy by mastodon.social.

Still this lead to significant discussion that mastodon.social should be defederated, because it got too big, and it did not have spam under control. While admins used the silence/limit option on mastodon.social liberally, as it is supposed to be used in this manner, not many servers seem to actually have defederated from mastodon.social. Some other servers even defederated with mastodon.social by mistake, not being clear that this is not a temporary measure like silencing is, and that it permanently cuts follower ties.

This changed the nature of the debate about defederation, as it meant that defederation as a way to deal with spammers is simply not a viable option in this type of spam attack. Temporarily silencing a server that is dealing with a spam attack is a more effective and simpler way to deal with the problem.

Search

The Mastodon-verse has long had a well-known tradition of not allowing search, holding the position that users should individually give consent to opt into search. This informal community code of conduct is assumed to cover the entire fediverse, but that is not actually correct. Other lineages of server software, such as *key (Misskey/Calckey), *oma (Pleroma/Akkoma) and Friendica (and Hubzilla/Streams) feature search in some form, and have done so since before Mastodon.

The Universeodon server openly decided to implement their own patch to enable full search for accounts on the server in Feburary 2023. They published blog posts detailing their process, and listed pull requests on the GitHub for Mastodon so this feature could get implemented more broadly. These blog posts, while public, did not spread far beyond the Universeodon network, and as a result, it seemed that people who held stronger views on the 'no search' side, did not actually realize what has happening.

This changed when last week, Byron Miller, the admin of Universeodon made a new post saying that the server has been running full search for a few months. He used this post to stress that it did not seemed to have generated direct harrasment, and that it did in fact help with better moderation on their server. This post gained a significant amount of traction, and thus reaching people who are on the 'no search' side. People felt this violated the community rules, and that they had not given consent to have their posts indexed and searchable on another server.

This conversation initially also veered into the direction of defederation, with the idea that people do not want to entrust their posts to a server that indexes them. So far this has been a pretty consistent theme in conversations around search. What felt different this time is the way more explicit response pointing out that most other server software does indeed already have search. Blocking Mastodon servers that enable full search should most likely mean blocking all servers that do not run Mastodon.

This changes the tone of the conversation, and while calls to defederate Mastodon servers that run search are visible, it seems that few people are willing to call for defederation of all non-Mastodon servers.

Looking forward: Bluesky and Barcelona

Questions about defederation are far from being over. Other decentralized protocols such as Nostr and ATproto can be bridged with the fediverse. The question is, do people want to have their posts be able to be read on a completely different network with different values. The Nostr network has quite different cultural values, with a heavy focus on censorship resistance. Not all fediverse users might appreciate having their posts appear in that network. Other users however might be interested in the ability to connect with people that they could otherwise not connect to.

The same issue goes for Bluesky. Everyone's Bluesky's posts (néé skeets) and likes are publically visible, and everyone can download them. This design choice might not fit well with the part of the fediverse that wants a more privacy-focused experience. This poses a question for people: do you want your posts that are made on the fediverse to reach Bluesky? And if not, do you want to defederate your server from the Bluesky network?

The questions do not stop here. More details are becoming clearing about Barcelona/P92, Meta's new text based network that also connections to the fediverse in some form. People on the fediverse have drastically different attitudes towards this news: from strong calls to defederate as soon as it launches, to a more hopeful attitude that this means a larger network. Whichever position might turn out to be the wisest, it is clear that defederation again is used by people as a tool to define their own part of the network.

The valuable part about decentralization is that it means that you don't have to agree on every subject with everyone else. You get to make your own choices about which people you want to connect with, and who you do not want to connect with. Defederation is in this sense a core part of how the fediverse functions.

What I hope is that people will be more explicit about the decisions they want to make with regards to (de)federation. It can be a great to have different servers with different value systems. The fediverse would be richer and better, if people could explicitly choose between servers that are open and federate with all other networks, as well as servers that have a more limited reach. It would be good if servers published their stance towards which servers they federate with. Currently most servers publish their rules about content moderation, which implies that they will defederate with servers who's attitudes towards content moderation differs too much. This is good, but can be expanded upon. Servers should publish if they defederate from Nostr, and in the near future, if they do not connect to Bluesky either. The same goes for Barcelona. People can have good reasons for not wanting to connect to a product that is made by Meta. If admins decide to make that choice, they should make it public, and indeed advertise it as part of their identity. This way, the fediverse can decentralize itself even further, by decentralizing community values.