I (Wesley, @alive@interlace.space) am considering spinning up a Mastodon server for ~50 people who are looking for a stable and safe home on the fediverse. I think that small servers with active moderation and closed or manual signups are the only healthy long-term model for the fediverse, and I want to help provide that.
The exact rules are a WIP, but you can expect something similar to the weirder.earth rules and the friend.camp rules. Please do ask if you have any questions about the specifics.
I will defederate from servers that host bigoted / transphobic / anti-Black / alt-right / nazi content, pedophilia / “““MAP”””, spam, malware, nonconsensual archives/proxies/bridges, and users who mostly cause a lot of problems.
I will also defederate from servers that I think are a bad for the health of the fediverse, such as Wildebeest servers, Twitter crossposters, most UFOI members, etc.
I will lean towards silencing instances that I think are too large to be moderated effectively (those with several thousands of users and mod teams not accordingly sized). Instances with tens of thousands of users or more are highly likely to be silenced (meaning posts from those instances will not show up unless you follow the author or follow someone who boosts one of those posts).
I will reach out to everyone following users on a given server before defederating that server, and give them time to reach out with concerns, contact mutuals that may be on that server to get them to move or establish other means of communication, etc.
The list of defederations will be available to users but not public. Notable defederations will be announced in advance.
If you want to have an idea of what this might look like, I’m happy to provide my defederation list for recurse.social and interlace.space to potential users, and to talk about any concerns.
It will run the Glitch fork of Mastodon. The post character limit will be set to 5000 characters. I will attempt to provide the ability to import toots from an old account, but that may be somewhat janky (as this feature is not supported at a protocol level, thus old replies, favs, boosts, etc will still refer to the old toot).
Users that make more than $50,000 USD per year will be required to pay $2/month, and users that make more than $100,000 USD per year will be required to pay $5/month to support the server. (This is on the honor system, and exceptions can be made if that would present an undue hardship — this is here as a rule of thumb and way of setting expectations). I will periodically publish information about what the income and expenses are.
The server will most likely be run on DigitalOcean on a server in the USA. The domain name is yet to be determined (if you have something cute you've been saving feel free to suggest it!)
If you’re interested in joining, please email me@wesleyac.com or DM @alive@interlace.space with the following information:
I will make a decision about whether to start this server and get back to everyone who messaged me by February 18th, 2023.