Use blocklist of nasty Mastodon instances

[gugray]

Use a consensus-based blocklist so the birb doesn't accept requests from bad Mastodon servers

[fishcharlie]

First of all. Really love what you're doing here.

I am however curious, what is the outcome you're trying to achieve with blocking instances? Moderation is primarily meant for the source of the content, not preventing the recipient of content.

Is this to prevent like DDOS attacks or malformed ActivityPub requests?

It's a huge deal going from being a simple bridge that exposes open content between platforms to being a moderator. And no matter what consensus based block-list you choose, it will have flaws.

My other question would be what would stop instance owners that you block from downloading the source and running it themselves? At that point you haven't solved anything, except for encouraging higher traffic to source websites. Seems a bit backwards.

[gugray]

Thanks for the remarks! Yes, these are things that are on my mind too (and part of the reason I'm not rushing ahead with any of this at light speed).

Cutting off Mastodon instances that are widely considered to be nasty is essentially about me saying, I won't be providing a free service to Bad People. Sure, they can go ahead and fire up their own parrot - but I'm not paying for it with my money and work.

The thing I already did was to exclude the RSS feed of Mastodon accounts from getting parroted. This is partly to prevent easily preventable loops, but more importantly to follow the intention of blocklists in the Fediverse. I.e., if an instance doesn't want its content to be relayed to a different instance through ActivityPub, then it also shouldn't be relayed via the Parrot.

The real tricky part is about the feeds themselves. There it's about saying, some content on the internet is just nasty and goes against my values, and generally Mastodon's values. I want to make a reasonable effort to prevent this type of content from getting amplified by the Parrot.

[fishcharlie]

@gugray Really appreciate the reply and thought you are putting into this.

I hope as you think more about this some of the terms like is just nasty and goes against my values. Moderation should be open and transparent with clear and specific rules. And everyone can interpret those phrases differently.

To be clear: I don't have any plans to use this service for anything that would be viewed as nasty. However, I do think transparency and openness is important.

One more example and question I have regarding consensus-based blocklist:

mas.to uses https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists Tier 0 as their block list (oversimplifying slightly). Where 60-80% consensus on blocks is required. One of the servers on there is threads.net. The creator of Mastodon & the largest instance (mastodon.social) has openly embraced threads.net and their support of ActivityPub. Not hard to find individual users unhappy with their instances blocking threads.net.

Listed here is a list of 5 instances that as far as I can tell make up that blocklist. 5 instances isn't a consensus blocklist. Even if all agree.

The term consensus-based blocklist needs more definition. I hope that any consensus-based blocklist chosen here will stand up to higher scrutiny than just having 5 instances.

My question here is: are you aware of any other consensus-based blocklists for Mastodon/ActivityPub? If not, is that something you're considering creating/working on?

[gugray]

I appreciate your insights from the first comment but I feel you're picking nits in the second when you are calling out my casual usage of 'nasty' and ignore the scare quotes I put around 'Bad People' through the stylistic means of capitalizing it.

Anyhoo here is my summary:

• The Parrot is not a community; it's not publicly funded; and it has no vested authority. That means it's not accountabe to anyone except my own conscience. It's a service I'm operating privately, so I have the luxury that I can kick out whoever I damn well please, and I can be as transparent or intransparent about it as I like.
• I happen to prefer being transparent about it. Specifically:
  • The reason I will ever kick off anyone is to be a good Fediverse citizen, to my own best understanding of what that means.
  • I actually made an effort to spell how I understand it out explicily, since the day the service went public, under "Values" at https://rss-parrot.net/web/about
  • To repeat without 'nasty' or 'bad person' but with cussing, the rules are this. I'll kick you off if you're on a shit instance, or if you request shit content, for my personal definition of 'shit', as outlined in the "Values" section at the "About" page.
  • Because I'm a lazy ass person, instead of vetting Mastodon instances myself, I will outsource this to the good people at https://github.com/gardenfence/blocklist. Their approach seems level-headed and reasonable to me, and their list of criteria align with my values. When that changes, I will revise my choice.
• In the unlikely event that all this somehow blows up in my face and starts to be an unreasonable amount of effort, or if people start giving me shit about it, I'll just turn off the Parrot. I'm doing this for fun, not for profit. This is also on the "About" page, so nobody can say I promised anything else.

[fishcharlie]

@gugray

but I feel you're picking nits in the second when you are calling out my casual usage of 'nasty'

Absolutely not my intention at all. You vastly misinterpreted what I was saying.

I actually made an effort to spell how I understand it out explicily, since the day the service went public, under "Values" at https://rss-parrot.net/web/about

Didn't see that page. Has lots of great info! Probably could have saved myself a lot of back and forth with questions here if I just dug around for that page a bit more 😆.

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Thanks again for the openness and transparency. Totally get that this is a free service, and you aren't obligated to do anything. I appreciate that you have decided to tackle this bridge, and look forward to seeing what the future holds for this service. 🎉