Euro folks terrified a blocklist will have an actually kind, decent, friendly instance on it "for no reason"--despite being ever unable to identify such an instance--is a whole entire thing.

Oliphantom Menace

There's a lot of fear over how this can be abused, but an abusive blocklist will be easily identified as such when you call out certain instances on the list that other people (by consensus) find to be an outrageous inclusion on the list, leading them to question the methods or sources by which the list was derived, thus leading to that blocklist being less trustworthy than other options, thus--I would assert--solving the hypothetical problem.

Oliphantom Menace

Meanwhile, there's an actually real, not hypothetical problem, called "new admins have to re-experience abuse and harassment from the same motherfuckers over and over again" and that's what the blocklist is intending to avoid.

And by all means, take the challenge on this. Visit some of those domains, hit their /about page, and see what their server rules are. If possible, see what content gets allowed and boosted on their home timeline.

Then get back to me.

FinalOverdrive

@oliphant my issue is that blocklists, inherently, cast too wide a net.

Oliphantom Menace

I use detroitriotcity as an example, because it's a fucking cesspool. And don't take my word for it, let's quote their /about page:

Detroit Riot City is an explicit free-speech instance established for, and maintained by, free-speech absolutists. That means profane language, racial pejoratives, NSFW images & videos, insensitivity and contempt toward differences in sexual orientation and gender identification, and so-called “cyberbullying” are all commonplace on this instance and the onus is on the individual user to know in advance what they are signing up for.
Free speech, here, as anywhere else, means you can express any opinion you wish.
We do not block instances, and I do not consider Lolicon to be CP.

It's literally a cyberbullying instance. They don't even deny it.

"The onus is on the individual user to know in advance what they are signing up for"

Since we know in advance, let's not give the benefit of a doubt to a bunch of fucking nazis, and put them on a list so no one has to be surprised by this occurrence when they predictably show up in a black person's replies to say the worst thing possible.

Oliphantom Menace

@FinalOverdrive In some cases, but see my detroitriotcity example below.

Oliphantom Menace

And despite calling that instance a cesspool (which is my opinion) it's an unambiguously true fact that the moderation policies of my instance, and the moderation policies of that instance are truly incompatible.

You can't pledge to moderate bad behavior and cyberbullying and then federate with an instance that promotes and excuses (endorses?) cyberbullying, misgendering, and other forms of social warfare.

Jackie (aka Queen Antifa) 🌹:debian_logo::linux:

@oliphant the only example I can think of is the long running beef between Ro and tech.lgbt

Also, some people don't like Kolektiva.

Oliphantom Menace

Let's use a lesser variation as an example.

Annihilation.social.

Here's their rules:

We do not block any instances.
Your allowed to say almost everything as long as its legal in the US(so no fed posts or loli).

So why are they on a blocklist?

Because once again, misgendering, cyberbullying, bigotry of any kind is explicitly allowed or more accurately not explicitly disallowed.

It's a real easy instance for them to moderate, because so long as someone doesn't bring the feds down on your instance, you can just ignore everyone's behavior.

So what happens when a user from annihilation.social says a bigoted thing to someone on another server?

They file a report.

The admin of annihilation.social laughs at it.

They aren't going to ban anyone over it, it's explicitly allowed by their rules.

So why federate with them at all in the first place?

Why not just put them on a list of "places to ignore that will be completely unhelpful in a moderation crisis and may, in fact, cause a moderation crisis" and go on about our day?

Oliphantom Menace

@burnoutqueen That's a common misconception, actually, and I don't think it's fair.

He doesn't actually directly put anyone on a list. It's a consensus-based mechanism, and his instance is not actually a contributor to that list.

So he, personally, can't put anyone on a blocklist. And that was exactly the position I wanted to be in, when I ran my own blocklist compiled from my own sources. I can't also be a source and a maintainer of the list. It's a conflict of interest.

So....yes, tech.lgbt is on TBS, from 20% - 70% because the sources (none of which are Ro's instance) actually block that server.

But it's worth noting that at 80% consensus, tech.lgbt drops off the blocklist. 80% is kind of a magic number for consensus, I've found, and that's why I tend to trust sources in the Oliphant T0 list, which all have 80% or greater consensus (Gardenfence, Seirdy's, etc.) Or a high level of curation (IFTAS DNI list).

The reason to provide different lists with different levels of consensus is that some people would prefer to be overly cautious, go with a 20% consensus list with a large number of entries on it. I don't know who those people are, but whoever they are, accidentally sweeping up "the wrong instances" into a blocklist probably isn't a concern of theirs, or they'd have chosen a list with much higher consensus.

In any case, I don't think it's true to say that Ro put tech.lgbt on the list. In response to some shit that happened, some of the sources used by TBS put tech.lgbt on their own instance's blocklist, and when an automated process ran that pulled the blocks from each server to apply consensus, tech.lgbt made a certain consensus threshold, thus appearing on the list.

Oliphantom Menace

So how does someone end up on a consensus-based blocklist?

I think there's a common misconception about this, too.

I think what people think happens is that a bunch of instances get together, and they vote, and if enough of them vote "yes" then it goes on a blocklist and if enough don't vote yes, then it doesn't, and that's the consensus.

But the "vote" isn't formal. The "vote" is: did this instance actually block them?

You vote by actually blocking the instance. There doesn't have to be any communication involved at all, and certainly not a formal vote. It just means enough servers actually did the blocking. Not talking about it. Not threatening to do it, the way your instance votes is to cut off federation with another instance. That means, potentially, pissing off people on your own instance who lose connections.

So for consensus, an automated process, perhaps run daily, checks all the sources. There's no formal vote, there's only a reflection on the list of what has actually already occurred.

While there could potentially be collusion, "Let's all block them so they go on the blocklist" you'd have to actually convince enough sources to do that and to take the PR hit from their own members in the process.

People leave instances over defederations, particularly if they are unjustified. So if you're actually willing to do it on your instance, either people on your instance don't actually care about the defederation in the first place, or you've accepted that some people are going to leave over it and that hasn't changed your thinking on the matter.

This is, I suspect, why it's hard to achieve 80% consensus for anything but the worst examples.

Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

@oliphant I still think your idea of a chained island of whitelisted Fedi nodes is an excellent one. The other day I was doing a deep dive into NetBird documentation and it seems like a perfect fit for your idea — it allows you to do authenticated wireguard that specifically chains traffic from peer to peer. Not only does it kind of separate it from the rest of the Internet, it also sort of separates the TRAFFIC. seems neat.

Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

@oliphant like I have this idea of starting a GoToSocial server project where it explicitly allows federation OUT but nothing IN specifically as a broadcast space for NGOs, charities, queer groups, trans groups, etc. It seems like it would fit right into the island idea.

Oliphantom Menace

@mitch You could sort of do this now with interaction policies. Have a GTS account that doesn't allow any replies. But I realize you're talking about something more involved.

I'll have to look into NetBird, though.

a software

@mitch @oliphant Slightly different but Website League is doing an archipelago network. It doesn't federate at all with wider Fedi.

The Website League

The Website League: it's like a confederation of independent websites in here.

(websiteleague.org)

Oliphantom Menace

@nyankat @mitch Yeah, it's doing more of what I call a "closed network" model, which is more compelling as it truly lets you create a separate network entirely. ION (the network I help run) is more of an open federation network, where individual islands can federate as they wish (beyond allowlisting the rest of the archipelago), relying on more of the built-in features of auth fetch + allowlisting to prevent an individual island's federation decisions to spillover to the rest of the archipelago.