I'm beginning to wonder if the only solution to hate speech and harassment on the Fediverse might be allowlist-only instances.
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@parsingphase Not A Lawyer Either, but I would be *very* surprised if "free speech" lawsuits would have any merit whatsoever. I won't let your server talk to my server? So what?
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mybarkingdogsreplied to Jack William Bell on last edited by
@jackwilliambell @jsit BTW, people using "whitelist" and "blacklist" in this discussion - you yourselves are perpetuating racism - the proper terms are "allow list" and "block list/disallow list"
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Jack William Bellreplied to mybarkingdogs on last edited by
I'm sorry if that bothered you. But the term 'blacklist' has nothing to do with race, except perhaps in the minds of those who are looking for racial meaning. It dates to before 1639 in England.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_term
And the term 'whitelist' is simply an inversion of 'blacklist'.
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mybarkingdogsreplied to Jack William Bell on last edited by
@jackwilliambell why are you so invested in defending this language when you could just use inclusive language? It says a lot about you
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Does anybody *know of* any "successful" existing allowlist-only instances?
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I recall reading about a coach in a religious private school sports league wanting to set up a network of Mastodon instances federating only with the schools and churches in its sports league.
Players, students and parents, etc. could have accounts.
Each school would run its own instance and federate only with the other schools and other approved instances.
I'm not sure whatever came of that, though.
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A fatal flaw in this idea: If an instance (limited.example) is in LIMITED_FEDERATION_MODE (i.e. is "allowlist-only”), then not only do posts from other instances (external.example) not reach limited.example, but posts on limited.example cannot be *read* by users on external.example.
I think it might be good if there were two levels of this setting: read-only, and no-read-write.
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I’m curious to hear input from @evan @thisismissem @Gargron on this idea.
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@jsit this idea has been floated a fair bit; limited federation mode has its, um, limitations. I'm aware of a few people who've attempted to switch across, but it basically means knowing ahead of time all potential servers that may want to interact with your server — that's a much larger list than the denylists that we currently have.
There's also some great writing by @jdp23 on "approval based" federation models.
e.g., https://privacy.thenexus.today/steps-towards-a-safer-fediverse/
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And @oliphant has some very interesting thinking at https://oliphant.social/@oliphant/112887351805362426
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, thanks for pointing this out!
@mybarkingdogs @jackwilliambell -
@thisismissem Thank you!!
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@oliphant @jdp23 It looks like the Outpost idea you outline doesn’t allow people outside of the outpost to follow people inside of the outpost. What would you think about allowing for that? I imagine some people might want to have a broad reach, but not hear from everybody who tries to mention them.
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@jsit @jdp23 This is basically the original idea I had, that doesn't use the "cold start" model, where you connect to an "approved" list of instances, that might even be something like mastodon.social, which would of course allow them to follow you back.
I might think more about that model as well, but I personally like a more closed or "alternate" network where you just create a new account rather than trying to get two different networks to "play nice" with each other.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace on last edited by
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It makes a lot of sense to start with the simple case. For a broader solution, I think @jenniferplusplus's thinking about multiple named federations is relevant as well. https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/112887785292385896
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@jdp23 @jenniferplusplus The allowlist subscriptions pending in GTS make something like this more possible, especially if multiple list subscriptions are allowed.
Either way, starting with an outpost/pod concept on the simple case would scale to this pretty quickly, even if the allowlists of the 'federation' are manual at first.
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