[Adminsysters] Looking for feedback on two questions regarding Systerserver Town

[Anne Roth]

Hi everyone,

we just had our (more or less) monthly meeting on running 
systerserver.town and came across some questions we'd like to decide on 
in the near future.

We have some thoughts but we're interested in more opinions and so we'd 
like to invite you all to add yours. No strings attached! You won't need 
to engage any more than you like. However, anyone who'd like to join us 
is of course very welcome.

_The open questions_

Currently systerserver.town is not open for anyone to register an 
account but instead we approve accounts one by one. General guideline is 
"We currently approve accounts by invitation, from the Systerserver 
community and request some kind of demonstration of acquaintance with 
the community."

Question #1: *Are we open for cis men* ?

To give you some background: Currently systerserver.town is a very quiet 
place. We have approx. 100 registered accounts of which some 40 are active.

We haven't had any requests by cis men yet (as far as we know), so it's 
not a pressing issue but it would be nice to get some opinions and make 
a decision and be clear about his.

What do you think?




And, different topic, we've been looking at how we handle the blocking 
of servers. Blocking on Mastodon can be done at different levels: you 
can block another user through your account, but the instance (the 
server) your account is registered at can also block either specific 
users or more broadly other servers. Which means that the users of 
systerserver.town can't interact with either the single user that was 
blocked or with all of the users of that server, if the server is blocked.

We don't have rules yet and we're currently researching. If you have 
thoughts, knowledge, experience in this field, please share it with us.

The specific question #2 here is:

*Should we federate with Facebook* / *Threads or do we block that* ?

There's been a major debate about this, see e.g. 
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/21/networking-traffic/threads-has-entered-the-fediverse/
https://mstdn.social/@feditips/111585534320522781
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/14eg8ai/facebook_fosstodon_the_fediverse/
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon

What do you think?


Also, if you don't have an account on systerserver.town but would like 
to have one, please register at systerserver.town/auth/sign_up and send 
us a message that this is you, and we'll approve you asap.

Currently the contact mailing address is gaba at riseup.net. You can also 
message me or write to systertown at lists.systerserver.net.

Some of us will be at the 'Global Gathering' near Lisbon at the end of 
September 
https://wiki.digitalrights.community/index.php?title=Global_Gathering_2024: 
If you're also going, please let us know - we'll try and find the time 
for a get together to talk about Systerserver Town.


Cheers,
Anne