The fosstodon.org Mastodon instance is currently hitting some community issues[1].
As a consequence, this instance it at high risk of being defederated from other instances of the Fediverse.
Meaning that our XWiki (@xwikiorg@fosstodon.org) - Fosstodon account wouldn’t be reachable for many Mastodon users.
The XWiki SAS sponsoring company is offering to host our account on social.xwiki.com
We are likely to proceed to the account migration in the following days or weeks.
Do you have any proofs for this claim? Isn’t the opposite the case, shouldn’t the ownership changes lead to federation being re-established? Do you have any information how many instances actually defederated and if this really concerns a significant number of users?
I’m also wondering if being on an instance of a company that will most likely be using this instance for advertisement without having any CoC (from what I can see) a much bigger risk of being defederated?
I’ve thought a bit more about this. Arguments for moving from Fosstodon to social.xwiki.com:
Some instances/instance admins have made their mind and have or will defederate from Fosstodon regardless of the people or actions of the future Fosstodon administration/moderation team. I hope (and don’t think) these are many instances, though, and I don’t think this will affect many Mastodon users. However, we could still decide that we still care about these users and move to social.xwiki.com, in the hope that it won’t be defederated (in theory, as long as everybody on the instance is nice and thus nobody complains about it, it shouldn’t happen from what I understand).
In the end, XWiki isn’t really fulfilling the criteria of a real, community-lead, non-commercial open source project as it (currently) has a single sponsoring company that controls most of the development activity. For example, XWiki wouldn’t be allowed to create an open source project account on Hachyderm because of this sponsorship (instead, it would have to pay for a company account). In this spirit, it seems logical that XWiki SAS should pay the cost for our Fediverse account, which XWiki SAS does by providing the server.
We might want to support the spirit of a Fediverse consisting of many small servers instead of being on a larger server.
Arguments against moving from Fosstodon:
The moderator who is the subject of the debate and the admins who tolerated him stepped down (and the moderator deleted his account). Fosstodon has a new admin, all I’ve heard from her (see here and here) seems very positive, she wants to learn from the past and also other instance admins, she seems to put thought into selecting a new moderation team, … So why shouldn’t we give her a chance?
XWiki SAS/OVH infrastructure as a single point of failure. In case of any issues with XWiki SAS or OVH infrastructure, we loose an independent communication channel that we can use to inform our users about the outage. I don’t know how social.xwiki.com is hosted, but I assume it is hosted on XWiki SAS’ infrastructure at OVH, meaning that for example if the data center of OVH that hosts it becomes unavailable (like because it becomes a real cloud of smoke), we’ll not only loose the main website, the Nexus repository, and the forum, but also our primary social media channel. The same applies of course in case of administrative or financial issues with XWiki SAS - this seems like an extremely unlikely scenario at the moment, though.
Availability. Fosstodon is hosted by Masto.host, a dedicated hoster for Mastodon. While a large instance like Fosstodon may face unique scalability and availability challenges, I wouldn’t be convinced that social.xwiki.com can provide the same (or better) availability/stability.
If we move, in my opinion it shouldn’t be because of the current events but because of trying to live up to the idea of a Fediverse consisting of many smaller, self-hosted servers and maybe larger independence (of other companies, not of XWiki SAS). However, as outlined above, I’m not convinced that having our social media account on the same infrastructure as the rest of the project is a great idea.
I’d like to add a data point. When I opened this discussion 6 days ago, we had 169 followers. We now have 133 followers at the time I’m writing.
While the absolute loss of followers is small, I believe this is highlighting the defederation, and a good motivation to move somewhere else.
Regarding your points “against”:
I feel like the damages are done and for now, fosstodon has a bad reputation. It’s going to take time to gain trust again and to be re-federated
if I understand how mastodon works correctly, being punctually down is not an problem as message can be fetched later, so availability this is not a crucial issue