Excuse me while I go donate even more money to PieFed

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[–] 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

Not sure I dig baking it into the code, that starts walking into the broken by design space. Feasibly the tankies developing Lemmy could do the same to any instance not painted the right shade of red.

I might propose instead a step in setup, or on demand, to select major instances to allow/deny federation from with a description of them. Impossible to keep a list of every new instance up to date, but catching the major hubs shouldn't be impossible.

Edit: For all those who replied along the lines of it being optional not a hard coded block, point noted. I should expect no less misleading a post from a pool of people prone to leaving out vital facts.

My understanding as it being an opt-out default defederation is still a bit grating since I tend to think of software as a neutral tool rather than promoting specific ideals, but it's far better than a fixed in state and does serve some purpose to shield new users from some of the most egregiously bad actors.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I might propose instead a step in setup, or on demand, to select major instances to allow/deny federation from

    This is exactly how it works. I started a PieFed instance and made the decision (during setup) to trim the defederation list down to none. Users can block on the account level.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Hello,

    Just to confirm, what did you exactly have to do to trim the defederation list during setup? Did you just use instance.tld/instances or did you do it differently?

    FYI @jet@hackertalks.com

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    If I remember correctly, I was presented with a text box pre-populated with the list of bad guys. I just selected them all with Ctrl-A and hit delete.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I'm on my computer now, so I'll type out some more detail if you're interested. To reiterate, I'm just going off memory and it was two weeks ago so I could very well be making stuff up...

    The pre-filled input box asked for each blocked instance to go on a new line, so:

    lemmy.world  
    lemmy.ml  
    lemmygrad.ml  
    hexbear.net  
    lemmy.zip  
    piefed.social  
    etc...  
    

    I deleted all of the defaults and that was it. I'll put a screenshot of the settings page that's available to admins below:

    Federation options

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Agreed on the risk of having baked-in bans, though alternatively, maybe using the already available tool, per-instance defederation would be better. Or also as Lemmy allows, users defederating from instances they'd rather avoid.

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  • [–] [S] 19 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

    Or also as Lemmy allows, users defederating from instances they'd rather avoid.

    Lemmy does not do this, the devs implemented an incredibly broken block system that is nothing more than mute. Suspected to be done this way intentionally.

    On an instance level, it does not block an instances' users at all

    On a per-user level, blocked users can still fully interact with your comments and posts, you just can't see it. What's more damning is that ActivityPubs spec'd block does do a proper block, but dessalines chose to roll their own broken system.

    In both cases, it's akin to this "one-way" federation they bring up.

    The only true way to block an instance, is for an instance admin to fully defederate.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Separating the communities from the users makes sense in some contexts, like blocking all of the communities of a NSFW type instance without blocking all their users. But there should be a additional option for users to block all the users of an instance without needing to do each one individually.

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  • [+] 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    While there are certainly some cons, block should mean block. If user A blocks user B, they should not be able to see each other, period

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  • [+] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    post misinformation or spam or snake oil on a public forum and then prevent that public from seeing anything in the comments that might contradict you

    That's what instance admins and comm mods are for

    Anything less than full blocking leaves a much bigger room for harassment.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If a bad faith user has blocked people who might be critical of their misinformation or poor behaviour, there'd be no-one to alert the moderators.

    Someone tested the consequences of this type of blocking on Reddit.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Piefed blocking should prevent the blocked person from replying to the blocker.

    I tried it a while ago, it was functional on the same instance, I don't remember between Piefed instance or between Piefed and Lemmy

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    The cons are pretty bad imo. It's common on Reddit now for people to get into an argument, reply and then immediately block to prevent a response and make it look like that person didn't care to respond. If someone is a poweruser and responsible for a meaningful portion of posts and spawned comment threads in a community, they can use the block function to strategically limit the ability of certain other users to participate, since a blocked person can not only not reply to them but also can't reply to anyone else further down a thread. This effect is worse in smaller subs, it's basically soft moderation powers granted just by blocking and writing things that generate engagement. And when this is happening, by its nature it is hard to even tell it's happening.

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