The Sunny Gardener - December 2023

Threads (Partially) Comes To The Fediverse

As they announced back in July, Facebook/Meta began with a limited test of federation in mid December, allowing Mastodon and other fediverse users to follow a small handful of threads.net accounts belonging to Threads team members.

My stance for sunny.garden is essentially unchanged since originally discussed back in July: we are preemptively blocking threads.net.

As I see it, there are two main reasons to allow federation with Threads:

• Being able to follow friends or other accounts on Threads from a single fediverse account, and without being a Threads user yourself.
• The potential to win fediverse converts and allow Threads users to migrate their account to the fediverse. While Threads has said this functionality will come eventually, it is still a long way off, and may never arrive.

These are both things that I might be pleased with if they pan out for the better; however, the vast majority of the feedback I received from sunny.garden users has been opposed to federation with Threads.

Many fediverse users, myself included, moved to the fediverse to leave behind various negative aspects of centralized big tech platforms, the advertising, engagement algorithms, centralized control, commoditization of personal data, poor moderation of hate speech, and so on… and have no desire to re-engage with those big platforms again at any level.

Spam

There was another wave of spam messages in mid December, mostly from mastodon.social and mastodon.world. Both are large well federated servers that allow signups without manual approval, which makes them attractive targets for spam operations.

I wrote about some of the difficulties in preventing fediverse spam back in May, particularly for servers that allow registrations without manual approval. The affected servers did manage to get things mostly under control within a few hours. mastodon.world switched to manual approvals for signups as part of their response, at least for now.

Summary

Overall activity was generally level for the month.

Typically there are less than 10 reports a month, but the spam wave resulted in burst of reports in December.

Hosting Costs

Storage costs continue to creep up slowly as expected, as the database size increases and more higher resolution media is posted.

Thank you, to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m able to cover the costs myself if needed.

– Brook