> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
I run a medium sized Mastodon server. I blocked them because one of their users called me the n-word, I reported them to their admin, and nothing happened. It had zero to do with fediblock or any other communal mechanism. Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
>The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
>Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
I really liked how the story starts with not wanting to introduce captcha because it hurts real users, then continues to spend the next 80% of it covering how open registrations and the public timeline were down for however long, extremely negatively impacting users.
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
I agree, fantastic writeup with a nice amount of technical detail sprinkled in. This would work really well as a talk at something like the Chaos Communication Congress.
notice the incorrect conclusion he makes. the fbi emails him asking for info about a user, with a screenshot that includes a threat of violence. FSE guy jumps to the conclusion that it's just innocent braggadocio (despite the fact that another CEO was murdered just 6 months ago). jump to end of article: guy has already committed countless acts of violence (by proxy).
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
I personally think that the fact that violent people exist shouldn't diminish our values regarding privacy and/or anonymity. I don't think you should accommodate messages such as the one WitchKing shared...but I think if you value privacy, your priority should be removing the user and the content, and not appealing to the Feds. Don't make it a safe space for either party, because neither of them are on your side.
>I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever, giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed.
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
The non sequitur was implying that the list was related to why those instances blocked this one, as though everyone blindly followed the fediblock recommendation. I didn’t. I’ve never, not once, taken fediblock’s advice without following up personally to verify their claims.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
Great read. I have a tiny, inconsequential, possibly wrong correction. You had assumed that the “Negative” word on the internal search engine screenshot was sentiment analysis. I think it was instead a button to report the post in the internal system as a “negative” result as in, not actually matching the search they were trying to do. Sentiment analysis doesn’t seem like it would be very useful in this scenario.
I disagree. The icon of "Negative" is of a red human head. Who would choose that icon for "False positive"? IMO it makes more sense as "Negative sentiment"
Interesting to see that this is kicked off by the referal header. Seems like a privacy issue to have your browser tell servers part of your browsing history by default.
Interestingly enough, it's configurable both from the user side and from the referring site side.
Most (all? all the relevant ones, I think) browsers honor the referer-policy[1] header if a referring site sets it. There are options in common site frameworks, like Django[2] to control that for UAs that respect it.
Since most UAs respect it, if the indexing site had wanted to, they could easily have prevented the header from being sent for most users.
Readit News
Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
Dead Comment
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
1) Gentleman is doing citizen science figuring out a small part of the FBI's intelligence gathering/spying apparatus.
2) Random Fediverse drama tidbits.
3) Interesting sysadmin tactics for small server operators.
4) This torswats fellow sounds like a piece of work and gets arrested which adds an interesting subplot.
5) Seems like quite an intelligent writer, I just like the style.
5 stars. Well worth reading.
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
That seems to be a problem with the Fediverse in general. And admittedly, Discord.
IIRC, Tor doesn't have that issue.
Most (all? all the relevant ones, I think) browsers honor the referer-policy[1] header if a referring site sets it. There are options in common site frameworks, like Django[2] to control that for UAs that respect it.
Since most UAs respect it, if the indexing site had wanted to, they could easily have prevented the header from being sent for most users.
[1](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Refere...)
[2](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/ref/middleware/#referr...)
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