I think part of the issue with Ello was that they sell themselves as non-corporative social media while maintaining two of the most important characteristics of corporative social media:
- Centralisation and lack of federation
- Being closed-source
The story would have gone completely different if they
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Had made it open-source allowing users to contribute to the project, both as devs and through donations.
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Added decentralisation and federation, allowing others to make their own Ello servers. This could have taken a lot of weight (financial and otherwise) from the developers/founders. Users cost money. Dividing the user base within different servers, pay by and moderated by different people means dividing the costs.
Well, it’s a list of "well maintained/moderated servers
Any server that federates with threads, a product of Meta a company known for their low quality moderation and lack of ethics, is clearly not a well maintained/moderated one.
It’s not a new rule. The admin is just applying the sites rules as they are, instead of making exception for threads as many of the techbro admins that are getting their servers excluded have been doing.