CounterSocial is a social media platform that aims to create a safe and respectful online community. It has a policy of zero tolerance for trolls, abuse, fake news, and foreign influence operations, and does not allow ads or the mining or sale of user data. It is crowd-powered and owned by its users. CounterSocial has blocked certain countries known for producing troll and bot farms or engaging in foreign influence operations, and has also been de-listed from the official Mastodon instance list due to a disagreement with Mastodon's founder over its terms of service. It is designed to be a decentralized platform, but a significant portion of its federation has blocked CounterSocial's IP space or domains and cut off communication. CounterSocial is focused on protecting the privacy and safety of its users.
CounterSocial is a social media platform that was originally based on Mastodon, an open-source code developed by Eugen Rochko. CounterSocial was designed to have a zero tolerance policy towards trolls, misinformation, fake news, bots, harassment, foreign influence operations, and other issues that plague many other platforms. It blocks access to certain countries that are known for producing troll and bot farms or enforcing laws that make participating in social media dangerous for citizens. Mastodon's founder, Eugen Rochko, accused CounterSocial of being xenophobic and racist and requested that other administrators block CounterSocial from their instances. After a cooling-off period, it became clear that the damage caused by Rochko's actions was irreversible and CounterSocial decided to fork its codebase, creating a new platform called Pleroma. Pleroma is based on the same open-source code as Mastodon but has a different governance model and allows users to customize their own terms of service.