From what I hear they took out all the moderation tools.

edit: ah, here's the commit which does it. https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/9cae431902a2c...

"- Return error from reports REST API - Remove links to report in web UI - Reject reports from ActivityPub"

(which is to say, if you're using it, the 'report' functionality is gone, and if someone on a remote instance hits the 'report' button on a toot from Purism and says 'send this report to my admin and Purism's admin' then Purism will just error out instead of accepting the error.)

I really dunno what possessed Eugen to think that was a good idea. Apparently this commit has been reverted but I've still defederated my instance from Purism because who the hell knows when they'll think this sounds like a good plan again?

I don't understand why you'd have to dig through another instance's git history and make a judgment call based on a reverted implementation detail.

Doesn't Mastodon have tools to notify the admin or even temporarily defederate based on X number of user reports from a given instance?

"Purism's instance removed all moderation tools" is the reason I have an opinion on them at all. I only realized they reverted that when linking to the commit where they broke it for my previous comment.

I might change my mind on defederating them if the users of my instance weigh in, but forty years of growing up along with the Internet has given me a rather jaundiced view of the ability of people whose primary concerns are softwarefreedom* to make sensible moderation decisions. Especially when they've started from a position of "we can completely opt out of moderating our social software, it'll be great, I'm sure everyone will behave like adults" and had to be argued out of that.