Mastodon's CEO Calls Meta's Moderation Changes 'Deeply Concerning' and Warns Users About Cross-Posting from Threads.

Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, expressed his concern regarding the significant changes in content moderation that Meta recently announced. These changes include the removal of fact-checking in their applications in favor of a new community notes feature, similar to what X offers. Rochko described these decisions by Meta as "deeply concerning" and a worry for those with social awareness.

Additionally, he warned Threads users who share content on Mastodon using Threads' federation feature that Mastodon will take action against hate speech and any Threads accounts that violate its current policies. Following the announcement of Meta's new, more lenient moderation rules that affect LGBTQ communities and other marginalized groups, many Mastodon users wondered how these changes would impact their decentralized social network.

Last June, Meta enabled its sharing feature in the fediverse for all Threads users after a testing phase in the United States, Canada, and Japan. This option allows Threads users to post their messages directly to Mastodon, helping them reach a wider audience.

Rochko had previously highlighted Threads' federation, considering it an added attraction for the Mastodon platform, and viewing Meta's adoption of the ActivityPub protocol as validation of the movement towards decentralized social networks. However, not all fediverse users agree with the integration of Mastodon and Threads; several smaller Mastodon servers have blocked Threads, preventing connections between their users.

Mastodon's response to Meta's new policy was unclear, as well as the actions that larger instances, such as mastodon.social, would take against Threads accounts. In a statement via his Mastodon account, Rochko reminded users that hate speech is prohibited and that actions would be taken against any Threads accounts that violate Mastodon's policies. He also urged Threads users who disagree with the direction taken by Meta to consider migrating to Mastodon, although he acknowledged that the process is not as simple as transferring an account between Mastodon servers, since Threads is not yet fully integrated into the fediverse in that way.