mastodon.ar.al is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
This is my personal fediverse server.

Administered by:

Server stats:

1
active users

Aral Balkan

Can someone please ask the CEO of Mastodon gGmbH to defederate with Threads? I used to know Eugen who ran the instance and could have asked him myself but I don’t know the CEO of Mastodon gGmbH.

@aral He's a founder and CEO now. Flying around New York.

They're trying to see if they can woo him into the system through money.

@aral Did Eugen state that he will federate?

@aral 1/2 Good luck with that! Seems like he doesn't understand how dangerous such move could be for anyone who uses Mastodon. For people who on purpose escaped from the madness of mainstream internet driven by the sick of greed ceo's, managers and rest of their digital slaves. For tons of average persons seeking their own safe place here on Fediverse. All of them are now in the situation where they are afraid of their future here, because some dude got some totally stupid idea in the head.

@aral 2/2 If he want to be okay vs. his users, he should ask people what they think about that. Do some voting about this topic and he also should respect all the final answers gathered from. This would be fair. But as we all see, it won't happen, because seems that he doesn't completely care what the others think. The end effect will be simple. People will search for and move, migrate to the next safe place and the whole story will repeat itself again. As it was many times before.

@MartinaNeumayer @aral Good idea! We need a public debate on this issue and its subsequent consequences. People, users have a right to say out loud what they think about that and also for voting if they want such option or not.

@aral You are a disgrace to Mastodon. I’m blocking you.

@aral
So, it occurred to me last night that it is possible that the Mastodon Organization cannot block or even encourage a block of Threads for the same reason Twitter can't ban them: it could potentially run afoul of anti-competitive laws. Because of this, legally speaking, the best course of action is to let them federate, then make a big public paper trail of the problems associated with federation, and use that as precedent to start limiting interactions. In short, waiting to block may be legally necessary.

That said, realize that everyone who has made the decision not to block has done so after some clear thoughts about it. We are aware that this is a bad actor, and we are aware that we will likely have a moderation scenario the moment they actually federate, assuming they even do. We have weighed that against the cost of preemptively blocking such a large new entrant, and decided to hold off for the moment, and wait until there is an actual problem.

@aral
Though, to be clear, I don't simply support people blocking them, I encourage other servers to block them. This is a decision that we made for our own server, but the reasons to block are very legitimate and very substantial, and it should definitely be considered the default here.

@Raccoon @woxok Mastodon gGmbH is a not for profit and is many, many orders of magnitude smaller than Meta, Inc. Antitrust law doesn’t come into play here in the slightest.