Federation & defederation policy
Last updated: 29 June 2026
plebos federates over ActivityPub, so your posts can reach — and you can be followed from — the wider fediverse (Mastodon and other compatible servers). Federation is opt-in to the open network by design. Our primary safety control toward other servers is instance-level: allowing, limiting, or blocking whole instances rather than policing individual remote accounts.
Why defederation
We cannot moderate accounts on servers we do not operate — they are sovereign and run their own rules. Following the established fediverse model, our valve is defederation: declining to exchange content with an instance whose behaviour is incompatible with our house rules.
When we defederate
We may limit or fully defederate a remote instance when, in our judgement, it:
- hosts or propagates illegal content (e.g. CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery) or refuses to act on it;
- is a persistent source of targeted harassment, threats, or spam directed at plebos users;
- exists primarily to evade moderation, or is operated in bad faith;
- poses a security or deliverability threat to plebos or its users.
Defederation can be applied as a limit (reduced visibility, no auto-acceptance) or a full block (no content exchanged). We default to the least restrictive measure that addresses the problem.
How it works in practice
Defederation is a moderation action and is logged like any other. We do not publish a real-time blocklist, but we will describe significant defederation decisions on request to affected plebos users. If you believe an instance should be reviewed, report it to abuse@plebos.com.
Limits of our reach
When you delete a post, we send a best-effort deletion outward to instances that received it — but propagation across the fediverse is not guaranteed. Remote instances are independently operated and may retain copies we cannot compel them to remove. This is an inherent property of an open, federated network, and it is the trade-off for not being locked inside one company's walls.