Hello again peeps, I come back to you with more exciting news. After last months vote passed to accept quokk.au as a member of the FAF, the vote on their end only just marginally failed for a 1-vote tiebreaker. The primary reservation people expressed back then was not wanting to follow the FAF defederations/bans as many people chose quokk.au explicitly due to their defederation list, particularly of Marxist-Leninist-friendly instances like hexbear.

Given however that there was willingness from admins on both sides to collaborate and provide mutual aid to each other due to our shared values, we went back to the drawing board to find a compromise. The main issue was that we wanted a way where we didn't want to sacrifice the tight integration of the FAF proper, but there is also an option "softer" version of the flotilla integration, which is less technical and more political.

So we came down to having two different tiers of membership in the flotilla

Consorts: These are the fully integrated members of the FAF. For all accounts and purposes, they count as a single instance, as they follow the same rules, bans and federations and their members get voting rights on all proposals. I.e. the original vision I proposed.

Companions: These are the more politically-only aligned instances.

• They don't have to follow the FAF defederations and bans so they have no say in those either. However companion instances can optionally chose to follow defederations and/or bans, which allows them to vote on them as well.
• They can take part in the voting for rules which don't refer to deferations or bans, and they have to follow those rules (e.g. golden rules, radical admin recalls etc). They are also allowed to propose new rule changes as well for the whole FAF.
• They get access to FAF private matrix channels and benefit from our resident technical expertise and moderation experiences.

Naturally a Companion instance can at any time become a Consort by simply on-boarding existing FAF defeds & bans and therefore immediately get future voting rights for those as well.

After we reached internal consensus on these two tiers, we then re-approached @Quokka@quokk.au to see if that would cover their reservations and we're today happy to announce that they've officially joined the FAF.

On a personal note: It's been always my passion to grow a system that is not only technically robust, but also politically as well, and the only way we can achieve this is by reinforcing the mutual aid ties between aligned actors, while providing enough independence for self-expression. This is yet another step in that direction and I hope it can lead to more versatile fediverse structures like feeler networks and whatnot.