Federation
Think of each server as a community hub that stores messages for its members. When you follow someone on another server, the servers communicate to exchange information and establish a trusted connection. When you post, your server shares it with the servers of your followers, ensuring they see it. This allows you to interact seamlessly with friends on different servers, as the servers handle all the behind-the-scenes communication.
The actual process of delivering content between servers, often referred to as federation, isn't anywhere near as clean looking as the chart above might suggest, with 9,000 active servers running Mastodon, and thousands of other servers running Pixelfed, Lemmy, Misskey, Akkoma, Gotosocial, micro.blog, Threads, Mbin and so much more.
vmst.io handles millions of these federation jobs per day.
Federation is a privilege, not a right. Each server must carefully curate the actors it federates with.
Defederation
vmst.io curates the servers with which it federates. Our goal provide a space for people to use for all manner of topics and conversations, while observing the general etiquette of being in a public space.
We defederate (aka Fediblock) vmst.io from other servers that are incompatible with our Rules, in an effort to protect our users and limit our liability.
The full list of defederated servers is available from Mastodon.
The decision to defederate from another server is not one we take lightly, as it may be disruptive to user relationships. We have two levels of defederation action that we may take against other servers.
Limit
Any server that consistently fails to moderate their general membership and can be demonstrated to host individual accounts that would contravene our Rules may be Limited.
- All past and future accounts from the remote server are silenced and will not be visible in public timelines, but can be found and followed.
- Followed accounts will show up in the home timeline of the member following those accounts.
Suspend
Any server that consistently fails to moderate their general membership and can be demonstrated to host a preponderance of accounts that contravene our Rules will be Suspended.
Any server that consistently delivers illegal or explicit content, gore, or other media that is forbidden on our server will be Suspended.
- All past and future accounts from the server are disconnected and undeliverable.
- No content from the remote server will be stored locally except for usernames.
- Accounts cannot be found nor followed.
Sources
In addition to servers which are manually added by our administrative staff, we regularly import from the following sources:
We would rather be proactive in blocking bad actors versus waiting for abuse to happen.
Bridges
While there are millions of active Mastodon users and great diversity in the people and organizations that participate in the Fediverse, others may participate in different decentralized network like Bluesky or Nostr which do not use ActivityPub as their federation protocol.
One option is to follow such accounts on other networks using a bridge.
There are a few issues here:
- While some people may intend to follow accounts from another network through a bridge and understand the limitations, these accounts end up federated and searchable by anyone else on the server.
- These bridges may not respect the original author's privacy or require them to opt-out of federation, republishing without the original author's permission or consent.
- There can be inconsistency in behaviors when bridged accounts are interacted with (followed/unfollowed, replied to, boosted, liked, etc.)
- Creates a single point of failure between networks, bridge implementations may not respond properly because they are overloaded or incorrectly implemented.
Protocol Level
Protocol level bridging is generally prohibited on vmst.io. We do not connect to these servers or allow our users' posts to be accessed through these servers.
Bluesky
Bluesky intends to be a decentralized and federated service, but using their own AT Protocol instead of ActivityPub.
At this time, we have defederated from the known Bluesky bridge that is being developed, brid.gy.
Nostr
Nostr is another decentralized and federated service that uses their own protocol instead of ActivityPub.
At this time, we have defederated from the known Nostr bridges in operation, based on Mostr.
Republishing
Servers which provide republishing of content from other services are allowed to federate, but with some restrictions.
These servers provide a "bot-like" account that may appear to be a native ActivityPub-enabled account, consumable in Mastodon. Likes and replies with the person running the source account are visible to other vmst.io users, but are not sent back and are never seen by the author. Boosts are shared to your followers, and visible to them only if they are on servers that do not block them.
Sources for republished content may be from RSS-feeds, X-Twitter, Instagram, or centralized services.
X-Twitter
From our start in 2022 through late 2024, we blocked federation with applications like bird.makeup.
After re-evaluating this policy, we now allow limited federation with these types of platforms so they can be directly added by a user.
No vmst.io user data is ever shared with X-Twitter.
Similar to our policy on X-Twitter, there is a deployment called kilogram.makeup.