1. Encouraging people to spread out from mastodon.social to encourage further decentralization is a good idea.
2. Mastodon.social probably shouldn’t be as big as it is, since it’s also the beta-testing instance.
3. Wholesale blocking mastodon.social is short-sighted at best, and will counter-productive to decentralization, because it shows all those people you’re blocking that federation doesn’t actually live up to its promise.
I mean, how many of your friends from Facebook and Twitter have you convinced to move over to Mastodon so they can still talk to you?
And now you’re telling them they have to move again?
Yeah, how do you think that’s going to go?
OK. Your server, your rules. If you personally don’t want to interact with m.s, that’s your choice. If you can’t keep up with the traffic, I get that.
Just make sure your users are OK with it, because they’re going to have friends who won’t move.
I spent 10 years as the sysadmin of a small ISP’s mail server. We blocked a boatload of incoming spam, phish, malware and more, using multiple tools to catch different types of bad email.
We never blocked Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or Gmail outright. It might have cut down the volume, it might have made *some* people happy, but it wouldn’t have solved the problem, and it would have caused *more* problems for our users and those they interacted with.