mastodon 4.7.3The official account of the SFBA Moderators.
Hello, #SFBA!
After careful consideration, we have decided to limit our federation with Threads.net. This means that, while existing connections to Threads accounts will remain in place, most Threads content will no longer appear on SFBA.social. We have more details on the information hub.
We look forward to hearing from you, and welcome your input. Thank you for being awesome, and happy posting.
https://hub.sfba.social/2025/01/10/federation-changes-with-threads/
Hello SFBA!
There’s been a rapid influx of spam accounts today. We have, temporarily, required new signups to be reviewed by our moderators before they become active.
We hope to reenable open registrations tomorrow. Thank you for your patience as we work on this issue!
To protect our community from a recent wave of scam accounts, we've made some temporary changes:
🔒 New signups are now restricted. We’re manually reviewing each signup request to ensure new accounts are legitimate. This has already helped block scammers before they can reach our community. However, we cannot block accounts from other instances, always consider where the account is hosted!
📅 This restriction is temporary. We’ll lift the checks once the wave of scam accounts subsides.
Help us out and protect your account:
We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to keep SFBA.social a safe and welcoming space 💚
From time to time, you may notice third-party tools interacting with Mastodon content — things like feed summarizers, cross-posters, or alternative clients. These clients typically look like any other Mastodon client from the server's perspective, and aren't easy to block outright. That means blocking a single user or instance of such a tool doesn't prevent the tool itself from accessing public content through other users.
The good news is that Mastodon has a built-in privacy feature designed for exactly this kind of concern: the "Opt out of search engine indexing" flag. Many third-party tool developers honor this flag as a signal that you'd prefer your content not be aggregated or processed.
If you'd like to enable this for your profile, you can find more information here:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/preferences/#misc
Take some time to review your privacy preferences and make the choices that feel right for you! As always, feel free to reach out if you have questions!
The only difference between SFBA and the standard Mastodon client is that SFBA has the character limit increased to 1024.
@scott@sfba.social @CStamp@mastodon.social @Mikal@sfba.social
Hello #SFBA!
We have made some minor updates to the code of conduct and server rules. We wanted to simplify them to be clearer and easier to understand!
The updated rules are available on the information hub: https://hub.sfba.social/governance/code-of-conduct
They are also reflected in the server rules on our about page: https://sfba.social/about
Happy posting!
We don't anticipate that the impact will be significant, but we'll have to wait a few days to see if anything really changes.
@scott@sfba.social The way we tend to moderate it in practice is that we take action when it appears to be something like a bot network or coordinated disinformation. But if it's just a person saying something that seems to be false, we generally don't, unless it's obviously dangerous.
Given the size of our operation, we don't really have the capacity to fact-check all things, so we may end up dismissing some reports, but it’s still worth reporting things that you find suspicious along with some explanation of your thoughts.
Overall, it's better to report than not report when unsure. Sometimes we get several similar reports, and that has tipped us off to a coordinated campaign.
Thanks for thinking about it!
Hi @audiodude@sfba.social,
Yes, SFBA will update to Mastodon 4.5 with quote posts. Our policy is to stay up to date with official Mastodon releases.
We're confident our community can adapt thoughtfully to new tools, and we look forward to your future posts!
There has been a wave of these scam accounts for about two weeks. They're being created on instances with open registrations, and we have been suspending the accounts as fast as we discover them. Please, if you notice any messages asking you to verify your account, keep reporting them!
Thanks for considering sfba.social! If you have questions about the instance, the moderation team would be happy to try to answer them for you. We don't exclude mastodon.social posts from trending; there just aren't very many of them.
In order to respect the privacy of everyone involved, we don't generally discuss individual moderation issues on the public timelines. If you have concerns about what someone posted, please open a report instead.
We have had a couple of them in the past! Perhaps it's time to plan another one!