counter.social was defederated because they do significant geo fencing. they didn't choose it.

i think they are far down the forked road anyway now, so not sure it'll work with other vanilla instances

@Jonathan Lamothe (he/him) ❌ That was an interesting read. Not sure I agree with the notion that their choices to not allow users from certain nations was a xenophobic move. Xenophobia is defined as "A fear of strangers or foreigners." They do not express fear.

Their decision was "...Because of CounterSocial's zero tolerance stance regarding trolls, misinformation, fake news, bots, and harassment, we configured our infrastructure firewall to block certain nations known for producing troll and bot farms or engaging in foreign influence operations"...

This action is quite common in IT departments around the world - not just social media hosting. It has to do with differing laws, accountability, lack of reciprocity, etc. It has nothing to do with individual users or xenophobia from what I see.

It's a matter of degree. If they had flagged all instances in the target countries and applied a 'defederate first, ask questions later' approach to moderation, I don't think most of the 'verse would see that as xenophobic. But just blocking all interaction with anyone from that county? It's hard to argue that's not xenophobic. It also flags the service as a potential honeypot or propaganda tool for geopolitical actors who oppose the blocked counties. There by dragons...

@me

@nus
> I can bypass the region block with a VPN

Exactly. If every expat living in China is able to get through the Great Firewall of China with a cheap commercial VPN service (and they do), it seems unlikely that geoblocking is going to keep state-sponsored Bad Actors out of counter.social. So all the policy really does is lull people using it into a false sense of security. This is, at best, naive, at worst intentional.

Avoid.

@shelenn @me

@nus
> If one person can bypass a whole country's surveillance, you can sure bet a whole country can bypass one person's.

Exactly.

@shelenn @me

@Strypey @Jonathan Lamothe (he/him) @A Goat with Dreams Never said a geo ban cannot be bypassed. That was not the point of the post. The accusation of xenophobic action does not appear to be true. The process of applying industry standard policy for USA IT departments is fairly clear. It may have zero to do with "right thing", moral compass, etc.

I've seen and been involved in cases with anti-US sentiments affecting moderation efforts in many online situations - in most cases it falls back on misunderstandings associated with language barriers and misinformation. I don't know if the details involved anti-US sentiment or not but that is besides the point of the post.

In any case, the policies of an instance are set by the owner(s) of that instance. If they are published and clear, users of that instance can decide whether they agree or not. Other instances have the right to make decisions about federating and what they moderate whether an individual or entire instances. Even with that, anyone blocked that are determined will create more accounts or even host their own instance.

Companies (even small one person LLCs and sole proprietors who run some of these instances) often do things to limit their legal liabilities. In a civil court of law, if a company admin takes prudent measures to protect its users, their liability is often nil when a user claims they were harmed. Often policies are set for these objective reasons and have no correlation to "doing the right thing" which is subjective depending on country and culture.

Getting back to the original post, counter.social made a decision to defederate with most of the Fediverse and are running a fork of Mastodon that may not be on parity with the latest version. It may be thereby incompatible with the Fediverse for all we know. Either way, that decision limits their reach which is counter-productive to its mission.

I think we may have found ourselves in a state of heated agreement here.

I agree whole-heartedly that by completely blocking the rest of the fediverse, Counter.social...

> limits their reach which is counter-productive to its mission.

Pretty sure @nus and @me agree too.

We got drawn into a side discussion on whether their geoblocking policy is xenophobic. We're all entitled to our opinion on that, but ultimately it's something each server admins gets to decide for their server.

@nus @me

I would like to see your research. I've only seen the one sided argument from Counter.social's sole proprieter, the anon grey hat hacker The Jester.

Felt very one sided and would like to hear from the side of Mastodon's founder. I'm sure he'll tell it differently. But I haven't found any toots or tweets about the beef from his perspective.