When we decided to pick up Mastodon, myself and others pitched Fosstodon as the home for the account on the basis that it appeared to be an inclusive server and other Linux distributions were homed there. Unfortunately, a recent incident that has made a prominent Fedora community and marketing team member feel unwelcome there has shown that it might not be the best fit for our account moving forward. The current server environment does not reflect our values in “Friends,” so it’s time to re-evaluate.
I believe that our account should exist on a server where our community members feel welcome, as it reflects Fedora’s branding and community members may be more likely to choose that server by the Fedora account being present there.
I don’t immediately have a suggestion as to where that should land, but there are a good deal more established, potential servers than the last time we evaluated this. To be clear, this kind of thing will always to some degree be a risk of using someone else’s hosting, but I believe Fosstodon’s position and enforcement here to be particularly unusual among established mainstream servers. I don’t believe the risks in general to having the account on another server to be any higher now than when we first created the account.
As far as technicalities go, migration on Mastodon means that followers and following will be migrated to the new account, but old posts/replies will remain on Fosstodon.
Two more links showing recent problems with Fosstodon:
Of course, Fossdon is a large server and will accumulate some issues. BUT, they have an express English-only policy for the server which feels at odds with Fedora values:
My deciding criteria for landing on floss.social was the strong ties to Free Software, the existence of other upstream communities to Fedora (GNOME, KDE, others), and a Code of Conduct modeled off of the Outreachy CoC. The challenge with that instance is that to the best of my knowledge, it is one admin and he has committed to turning off registrations on that instance after a certain point (I think 1,000 accounts).
I know the Hachyderm instance was promoted too, although I also heard they forbid corporate foundations from registering an account there. Technically Fedora is not that, but it is sort of a murky area that I have not explored further.
I remember someone mentioning a Treehouse instance but I don’t know anything about it.
I agree. It looks like this was something we overlooked then (myself, included), but should be something we intentionally consider moving forward now that we’re all a bit older and wiser. Fedora definitely serves more than the English-speaking world.
What about the Fedora project running its own Mastodon server? This could be used for a main “Fedora” account, and perhaps accounts could be offered to SIGs and spins.
This indeed used to be the case. They have since relaxed the rules, but there would be some extra red tape that might still make it a non-starter. Hachyderm otherwise has a reputation for being well moderated and they have a funding source (nivelny). (RIP Kris Nova ).
This is a good sign! Also, "Posting in English is recommended, for maximum conversation opportunities within the FLOSS community, but it is not required. " (Italics mine.)
I don’t know that Treehouse has more active admins than Ariadne, either. I’d have to ask. For that matter, m6n only has me as active admin, which is why I’m not proposing it.
floss.social does have a good reputation but admin coverage is the main concern.
I remember that my first account was there. Since some times I tooted something in my language instead of English, I was contacted by some moderator, asking me to toot only in English.
I think that this is a policy to avoid moderation burdening.
And this didn’t mean that I couldn’t follow people tooting in other languages.
The thread linked in the OP has some useful and necessary context, but yes, you are correct that Fosstodon holds this position, and it has unfortunately shown itself to be problematic.
For context - Michael Downey is the (main?) admin of floss.social and I’ve never seen him posting anything controversial (the most heated I’ve seen him toot is about Facebook/Meta, which is … fair enough), so… him being suspended by Fosstodon is … concerning
The Asahi folks are mostly on treehouse.systems, but apart from that I don’t know much about it.
I fear that if we start changing server as soon as someone is banned or suspended rightly or by mistake, and a campaign against that server begins, we will end up without a place where to stay Apart running our own instance.
In this case, I believe this to be a server issue and not a strictly interpersonal issue. Moderation is indeed an inexact science, for sure (see Josh’s Fosstodon links above as well), but the rules and the enforcement do not reflect Fedora’s values in my opinion. I will own that when I pitched Fosstodon in the original discussion, I overlooked this, mostly because I was considering other criteria more closely at the time. It’s reasonable to re-evaluate decisions we make after some time, and when our community members feel unwelcome, we need to evaluate whether the server’s policy and moderation generally reflects our Friends value. The response of the moderator in addition to how the policy was enforced here has convinced me that those values are not currently aligned. If another server more closely aligns with our values and practical needs, then the effort is worth it, IMO, for keeping the Fedora community as hospitable as possible.
Putting Fedora on its own server is an option, even just for its own account, but the reach of the account may also be impacted, on top of the technical debt of regular maintenance. I’m neither opposed to it, nor do I think it’s strictly necessary.
I should also point out that as Fedora grows, we might want to make release and community announcement posts in Spanish, Chinese, or other languages that our community reflects. Doing so on our current server would be an apparent violation of the terms. I believe we should have the freedom to make such posts, at our own discretion.
The rule used to be that accounts of FOSS projects with a sole-corporate sponsor were categorically disallowed. The rules have relaxed since then, but I agree that it still seems likely insurmountable, wrt Hachyderm.
Floss.social is the best recommendation I think we have so far. Proximity to other related projects with similar values is a significant plus as well, IMO. At quick glance, I see a number of active Fedora community members on that server as well.
If there is interest, I can ask Hachyderm if if they would consider Fedora under the non-corporate OSS project category. Of the five “” example cases, only that “single corporate sponsor/owner” point seems possibly applicable, and the examples there are Google’s Go Programming language and Hashicorp’s Terraform — and for those who haven’t been watching, that last is kind of a prescient example, as Hashicorp has abandoned open source licensing.
Both of those projects are literally owned by the corporation, because they require copyright assignment via a CLA — that’s how Hashicorp could do what they did. Fedora isn’t like that. (And we do have other sponsors!)
(For what it’s worth, I have my personal account at Hachyderm.)
It seems a number of other servers are defederating or planning to from Fosstodon now, which is a factor to consider for loss of reach by not migrating (and hopefully sooner than later). It’s my understanding that when a server blocks Fosstodon, Fedora will lose any followers from the other server, without notification to those users, even if that block is later removed.
).
Apart running our own instance.
” example cases, only that “single corporate sponsor/owner” point seems possibly applicable, and the examples there are Google’s Go Programming language and Hashicorp’s Terraform — and for those who haven’t been watching, that last is kind of a prescient example, as Hashicorp has abandoned open source licensing.
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