Statement on Gab’s fork of Mastodon - Official Mastodon Blog
▻https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon
Mastodon is completely opposed to Gab’s project and philosophy, which seeks to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech. Mastodon remains committed to standing up against hate speech; for example, our new server covenant means we only list servers on joinmastodon.org that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia. The Mastodon community does not approve of their attempt to hijack our infrastructure and has already taken steps to isolate Gab and keep hate speech off the fediverse.
Mastodon champions a free API ecosystem and as such all Mastodon apps are created and maintained by independent developers. However, Tusky (Android) and Toot! (iOS) have blacklisted Gab’s domains from their login screens. Gab users will not be able to use these apps to access or post from Gab. We do not currently know if any other apps are doing the same. Mastodon itself allows instance owners to decide which domains to block. Most servers in the fediverse are already blocking the Gab domains and we have done the same at mastodon.social.
In addition to the isolation Gab can expect from the fediverse, it is clear that their design choices offer users no incentive to choose their platform. By paywalling basic features that are freely available on Mastodon, Gab puts itself at a disadvantage compared to any Mastodon instance. Mastodon remains non commercially structured and all features are available to users freely from the start.