{"id":4283,"date":"2023-11-17T19:00:05","date_gmt":"2023-11-17T19:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2023\/11\/17\/blocklists-in-the-fediverse\/"},"modified":"2023-11-17T19:00:05","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T19:00:05","slug":"blocklists-in-the-fediverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2023\/11\/17\/blocklists-in-the-fediverse\/","title":{"rendered":"Blocklists in the fediverse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Join the discussion <\/a><\/figure>\n

It would be great if Mastodon and other fediverse software had other good tools for dealing with harassment and abuse to complement instance-level blocking \u2013 and, ideally, reduce the need for blocklists. <\/p>\n

But it doesn’t, at least not yet. \u00a0<\/p>\n

That needs to change, and in an upcoming installment I’ll talk about some straightforward short-term improvements that could have big impact. Realistically, though, it’s not going to change overnight \u2013 and a heck of a lot of people want alternatives to Twitter right now. \u00a0 <\/p>\n

So despite the costs of instance-level blocking, and the potential harms of blocklists, they’re the only currently-available solution for dealing with the hundreds of Nazi instances \u2013 and thousands of weakly-moderated instances, including some of the biggest, where moderators frequently don’t take action on racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, etc content. \u00a0As a result, today’s fediverse is very reliant on them. \u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Steps towards better instance blocking and blocklists<\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

“Notify users when relationships (follows, followers) are severed, due to a server block, display the list of impacted relationships, and have a button to restore them if the remote server is unblocked”<\/p>\n

\u2013 Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput, discussing the tentative roadmap for the upcoming Mastodon 4.3 release<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since the fediverse is likely to continue to rely on instance blocking and blocklists at least for a while, how to improve them? \u00a0Mastodon 4.3’s planned improvements to instance blocking are an important step. Improvements in the announcements feature (currently a “maybe” for 4.3) would also make it easier for admins to notify people about upcoming instance blocks. \u00a0Hopefully other fediverse software will follow suit.<\/p>\n

Another straightforward improvement along these lines would be an option to have new federation requests initially accepted in “limited” mode. By reducing exposure to racist content, this would likely reduce the need for blocking. \u00a0<\/p>\n

For blocklists themselves, one extremely important step is to let new instance admins know that they should consider initially blocking worst-of-the-worst instances (and their members are likely to get hit with a lot of abuse if they don’t) and offering them some choices of blocklists to use as a starting point. This is especially important for friends-and-family instances which don’t have paid admins or moderators. Hosting companies play a critical role here \u2013 especially if Mastodon, Lemmy, and other software platforms continue not to support this functionality directly (although obviously it would be better if they do!)<\/p>\n

Since people from marginalized communities are likely to face the most harm from blocklist abuse, involvement of people from different marginalized communities in creating and reviewing blocklists is vital. One obvious short-term step is for blocklist curators \u2013 and instance admins whose blocklists are used as inputs to aggregated blocklists \u2013 to provide reasons instances are on the list, checking to see where receipts exist (and potentially providing access to them, at least in some circumstances), re-calibrating suspension vs. silencing in some cases, and so on. Independent reviews are likely to catch problems that a blocklist creator misses, and an audit trail of bias and accuracy reviews could make it much easier for instances to check whether a blocklist has known biases and mistakes before deploying it. \u00a0Of course, this is a lot of work; asking marginalized people to do it as volunteers is relying on free labor, so who’s going to pay for it? \u00a0<\/p>\n

A few other directions worth considering:<\/p>\n