Apparently 10 days was the time set on my Mastodon shadow ban. I was thinking either 1 day (after apology and mod review), 3 days, or 7 days. But when the 7th day passed and I still had a limitation on my account, my next guess was 10, and I was right. The ban lifted on Wednesday.
The mastodon.coffee mods never responded to my appeal, and to be honest I had no hope that they ever would. Of the 5 mod accounts listed, 1 is gone and 3 haven’t posted since 2022/2023, which makes me wonder if they’re just sock-puppet accounts. The 5th mod is the owner. So they apparently don’t care about dot coffee or for any of the 1364 other users on the site.
I did create an account on mas.to just to see how the other half lives. It surprised me that mas.to has significantly more users, is faster, and has global search enabled for those who opt in, something not available at all on dot coffee. I like that feature; I’ve wanted that feature for a long time, if only to search my own back posts.
It’s tempting to jump to mas.to, but I really do like the dot coffee domain name in my alias.
What gets to me is that Mastodon is billed as the social platform with low switching costs, so you’re never locked in and can move your account to wherever. But that’s incorrect. What doesn’t carry with you is your post and media history. You can export your filters, follows, block lists, and other stuff, and import that on the next site (you have to manually do all of this), but there is absolutely no option to move the 8800 posts I’ve made since 2022. All I can do is export them and keep the dump file. That bothers me, and it should bother anybody whose use case and expectations don’t fit the top-down ethics of the Fediverse builders.
At some point I’ll migrate, but for now, I’ll let this black eye heal and think twice before donating again.