Admin of todon.nl suggests, and rightly so, that the default/flagship Mastodon instance (isn’t decentralisation great?) be moved to a more neutral jurisdiction than Germany:

“Herewith the urgent request to move the Mastodon server presented to new users as the default (mastodon.social) to a more neutral jurisdiction (e.g. Switzerland). An alternative is to set up a new Mastodon server in a more neutral jurisdiction, which can then serve as a new flagship server.

The trigger for this is the regular negative moderation of people who speak out against the largest and bloodiest genocide of our time, the one in Palestine. In particular they use (or abuse, how you want to look at it) of a German law that seeks to counter so-called Holocaust reversal. With hiding behind this law, the moderators of mastodon.social (and especially its owner) are also unwittingly sitting in the chair of the (German) judge.

Apart from the fact that one local law should not affect the entire Mastodon project, the question is whether this law and the concept of Holocaust reversal are legally tenable in an international context.”

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/34747

Mastodon mod closes the ticket after stating “There is no current plan to make changes to the Mastodon instances operated by Mastodon gGmbH. People are free to choose any Mastodon server when signing up for the platform.”

And this (see screenshot) is what that “choice” looks like.

This decentralisation anti-pattern – along with the fact that they didn’t close registrations after hitting a certain size to create a social precedent and allow distribution to other servers (as I advised Eugen to do back in the day) – is why there is a flagship instance to begin with when it’s an absolute contradiction of terms in a system that purports to be decentralised.

#fediverse #mastoson #mastodonSocial #todonNL #Germany #israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #Palestine #Gaza