Defederation
We "defederate" vmst.io from other servers that are incompatible with our fundamental rules, in an effort to protect our users and limit our liability. The decision to defederate can come from reports by our users but is also based on community discussion around such bad actors, including the periodic import of community-maintained blocklists. We would rather be proactive in blocking bad actors versus waiting for abuse to happen.
Blocklists
We believe community-maintained blocklists serve an important purpose to help jump-start servers in providing protection to users from abusive or disruptive individuals.
We choose to use extremely high-consensus threshold lists for our suspension (blocked) list to prevent breaking connections from users unnecessarily. We have a lower threshold for importing limitation (muted) lists as these changes can be undone without breaking user connections.
Sources
Suspension Sources:
Sensitivity
Our defederated server list includes domains where the name itself may contain offensive language, or the resulting site contains harmful or illegal materials. As a result, the domains are partially redacted when viewing on the vmst.io/about listing.
Reporting
If during your use of the platform, you find another server that you think needs to be restricted from interacting with ours or if you feel that another server may have been blocked by our staff in error, please file an issue on our GitHub. If you'd feel more comfortable, you can also reach out to one or more of our staff directly via private mention.