The Death of Infosec Twitter

Eh? There are _some_ Mastodon instances which are to some a community distinct from Mastodon writ large, but that's not most of them. I moved from Twitter initially to mastodon.online (one of the giant ones, not really a community at all), then to mastodon.ie (the generic Ireland one; marginally a community, but only very marginally), and reserve the right to move further if appropriate. But I don't see why anyone would care about the distinction between them, really.

Generally, I would assume it's less not wanting people to know, and more that it's irrelevant detail. I think this is maybe a common point of confusion over Mastodon; for most people, for most purposes, the instance _simply does not matter_. There are some generally very small instances which are highly focused on specific communities (and may even require that user content revolves largely around those communities) but those are rare; I'd expect under 1% of the user ship. For most people Mastodon is the community, not their instance.

If someone says "I used to do business mostly by post and fax, but now do it mostly by email" you wouldn't go "ah, but are you using gmail or hotmail? It must be a conspiracy because you don't want to tell us!" They don't name the email provider because it is _irrelevant_.

Hrm, what makes you believe that? There are a _few_ largely disconnected instances, but, in particular, the vast majority of instances in terms of usership (excepting intentional islands like Truth Social and Gab, and that one Japanese one) do federate with the giant instances like mastodon.social and similar, tying the whole thing together. In general, if you're using a "normal" instance (ie either one of the big ones or one moderated in a similar way) you can see most other users and most other users can see you. It's only if you're on either a service which everyone wants to block (rare, mostly small Nazi-oriented ones or ones which tolerate cryptospammers) or a service who blocks practically everyone (overly trigger-happy; these tend to rapidly wither and die) that you're isolated.

> it would be far less damaging to the structure of the "fediverse" if that blocking was user-based instead of site-based

Both are options. Defederation, for most instances, is the nuclear option, not the first tool in the box.

I do think at some point it's somewhat likely that there'll be a Muskian 'free speech' shadow fediverse (ie the sort of place Mr Cat Turd would be proud to call home), which will be largely detached from the main one but will federate amongst itself. There's some indication this is kind of developing already (many of the instances that nearly everyone blocks do federate with _each other_). Lots of viable islands seems less likely, though.

Also, a highly changing environment (regarding security threats) makes strong networking a survival trait. You don't want to become isolated from a part of the community, and you can always keep both Twitter and Mastodon. In fact, keeping both accounts is a must, because many security companies and government institutions are still only on Twiller.