Two weeks ago, the CoSocial board asked the membership to comment on the question of whether our Mastodon instance should pre-emptively defederate from the soon-to-be-released ActivityPub-enabled Meta community, Threads. The results are available under the hashtag #CoSocialMeta.
Only a few of the responses are in favour of pre-emptively defederating. The primary response is “wait and see”.
Based on this input, the board voted unanimously in favour of the following proposal:
“CoSocial.ca will not pre-emptively defederate from the Threads app fediverse instance by Meta. However, we authorise the Trust and Safety team to take all necessary steps to protect user safety on CoSocial.”
Our reasoning is this: CoSocial is a service that its members pay for. If the board and staff restrict that service in any way, it should be to improve the quality of the service for everyone.
We do block over 200 instances that have been set up intentionally for harassment and abuse, or that are so poorly managed that they are a haven for harassers and abusers. We think blocking those domains makes the experience of the fediverse better for all CoSocial members.
Until the Meta service is released, we won’t know what the impact will be on CoSocial members. Absent a very strong signal from our membership to do so, we should not preemptively block that server.
Individual CoSocial members will be able to block the threads.net domain. This should screen any incoming content from the Meta site for them, and keep anyone on the Meta site from following them.