Hi all, I’m a Lemmy FOSS app contributor that’s made a couple of tools for people starting small instances including Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS) for building content on new server’s All Feeds and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Today I’m releasing Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS). When launching a new Lemmy instance, administrators may not understand the necessity of defederation with problem instances. Using LDS, you can sync your instance’s “blocked instance” list with that of another server(s) whose admins you trust.
Shared Fediblocks are a plague. Get added to one by somebody that personally dislikes you and every instance that uses the block will unknowingly block you.
Don’t worry, highly popular instances won’t get on the block list and small instances don’t matter enough for it to be a problem. Power always favours the powerful.
The issue is there’s no oversight here, or at the very least, no oversight that we can trust to be impartial.
When parties form a federation, it’s usually with a signed agreement, to maintain the integrity of the federation and keep it together. Shared standards, rules, ideals, regulations, etc. All I’m seeing here are parties trying to carve out a sub-federation, and with no neutral oversight, it’s just going to become a “people like me” circle.
And I guarantee at some point people are going to start thinking “Hey, if this instance isn’t subscribing to the shared blocklist, that must mean they want those other instances around, and therefore they deserve to be added to the list”
Then just like that, the fediverse has a defacto authority. Instead of one sepz, we have a council of them from the largest instances.
And I guarantee at some point people are going to start thinking “Hey, if this instance isn’t subscribing to the shared blocklist, that must mean they want those other instances around, and therefore they deserve to be added to the list”
Already is happening on the Mastodon/Pleroma side of the Fediverse. Instances getting de-federated because they dared allowed their users to see posts from “bad” instances
Lol, sometimes I feel like the ‘fediverse’ (hate that name BTW) is filled with the worst people.
Lemmy is built as a single instance with federation capabilities as an after thought. The biggest clue to this and the reason why it will always re-centralize is that communities are server bound. There is no fediverse wide community and they is by design. Read this closed issue
This sounds a bit like how to bring the shared blocklists from Twitter to Lemmy. Those were a disaster on Twitter, and I don’t expect it’ll end any better here either…
Please don’t use tools like this. Manually curate instances you feel the need to defederate with. The Fediverse was built on a model not unlike that of email. You wouldn’t just randomly block whole email providers willy-nilly, so you shouldn’t do so here on the Fediverse either.
As a sysadmin that’s a terrible analogy:
- Shared email Blocklists are the norm, not the exception
- As a professional IT admin I would absolutely blackhole any vile hives of scum and villainy rather than dealing with their BS. If someone is going to do that for me I’ll use the tool.
Also a sysadmin.
Shared email Blocklists are the norm, not the exception
Shared blocklists in IT are managed by industry professionals for the purpose of safety from malicious activity and there are vetted processes for being removed from days lists. False positives happen, but you aren’t hung out to dry if you get hit, you just go through the process and clear your name.
Most of this “Fediblock” nonsense is several orders of magnitude less reliable, and filled with toxic people pursing personal grudges. There’s no process to clear your name, and I’ve personally watched multiple admins and their entire communities be publicly mocked and told they “don’t owe you anything” for merely asking why they were blocked, let alone how to remedy the situation.
These are not remotely equivalent and anybody who trusts them is a fool. The Fediverse has a serious problem with vile, bitter people who would not be out of place running an HOA. If we are going to emulate the blocklists common in IT, we need professionals in charge of it, not nosy busybodies.
we need professionals in charge of it, not nosy busybodies.
Great, you form the not-for-profit company to manage this and get the buy-in from a critical mass of servers. Gold luck finding and vetting staff
The point is valid though The fact that they’re not going to set up the solution doesn’t invalidate their core message.
I can equally point out that you’re not providing a viable solution either.
Except you don’t import blocklists, you typically query them (and maybe cache that result for a very short period) as email blacklists are very transient, especially so that admins can remediate. Also email blacklists aren’t being weaponized for “I vehemently hate/disagree a select few of users on this server”, it’s generally reserved for high-volume spam.
Read my other reply, I’m not talking about email blocklists, my reference is to email providers doing that, which is extremely rare and done with explicit intent and good reason.
Secondly, while I won’t disagree there’s some vile content out there on the Fediverse, do you trust someone else to make that decision for you? Why would you let someone else decide what is and isn’t vile for you and those using your instance? Better yet, how would you feel if some popular instance decides you were the vile one, and because it was a common instance to use for blocking references, your instance is now cut off from a good chunk of the Fediverse?
This is exactly the sort of nonsense that swept Twitter with shared Blocklists, and the potential for negative impact on the Fediverse is even worse from it. Don’t let others decide make decisions for you just because it’s easy, as it doesn’t absolve you of responsibility when something goes wrong.
Now you compare EMails aka mostly private communication to a public forum, that’s even dummer…
The ActivityPub standard is modeled on email. Each instance is a server, and we all have inboxes. It’s a very apt comparison to use.
Also, unless the email is E2EE, then it’s not private, no more meaningfully so anyways.
🤦
Admins can and do use email server block lists, though, so maybe that’s a great example.
I suppose you’re right–for now. But at some point Lemmy etc will grow large enough to make manual blocking infeasible. Just how much effort does it take to start a new instance even today?
Wrong comparison. It’s not like a server admin using an email block lists (which are also often implemented badly, as anyone with a protonmail account knows…). It’s more like if Protonmail suddenly blocked Tutanota, or if Gmail blocked MS Exchange. The uproar and rage from that would be unceasing.
The Fediverse operates on a model like that of email, and in the email world blocking whole email servers from each other is very rare, and usually done with the most explicit of intent and for a very good reason. That’s how the Fediverse should operate as well.
Youre just flat wrong here. Basically every email admin uses RBLs to one degree or another.RBLs commonly block whole email servers that allow spam, not individual users. Thousands of email servers. You literally dont know what youre talking about.
The reasons “MS exchange” are not blocked is because they clean up their servers and ensure this bad behavior is not passively or actively allowed. Protonmail had some serious spam issues, which is why they were blocked. They were not doing the work it takes to be a good member of the “email” federation, so they were excluded from it.
RBLs are ruthless, because email has no enforcement mechanism for good behavior besides “you are not allowed to talk to me.” Thats the nature of federation. There is no central authority to appeal to, so each member of a federation instead sets their boundaries. You play nice, or other people dont have to deal with your shit, and RBLs are a proven and effective tool to help them accomplish that.
The only issue with reputation block lists for the fediverse right now is that it’s still very small. They will likely limit growth, but that’s up to the server admins to weigh agaisnt allowing hateful content. Youre always free to spin up your own server and federate with whoever is willing.
This is a terrible idea that steers lemmy into being an echo chamber. Let admins use their own judgement.
But isn’t that what this program does? It allows you to choose an instance with admins that you trust. And those who want to review every single one manually can still do that. I’d love this tool. The ones setting up these servers aren’t stupid. They can use their judgement and use this tool if they want!
And those who want to review every single one manually can still do that.
But will they? This tool promotes blindly trusting another instance block list without due diligence from the admin.
Don’t know. That’s up to them. The problem is not the tool but the unreflected trust in blocklists. The Internet is huge, if Lemmy takes off so will the number of instances. The amount of decisions needed to get a legal instance working in many countries will be insurmountable. I’d rather piggyback on someone I do trust as a rough basis. It won’t be perfectly tuned with my informed decision but the alternative is me not setting the server up. The list of defederation can be reviewed. If you’re careful about the template its not blind trust. Much in the same way as using FOSS software without understanding all components isn’t blind trust if you’re careful about the source and verify downloads. It’s not perfect but the alternative is not using the software at all.
Why not set up your own instance?
I’m going to found a user community for it! I’m kind of cooky, so I’ll name it “the church of LDS”. Surely nothing litigious will happen.
Jokes aside, great work :)
Obviously opinions are divided on shared blocklists, but we’re at the beginning of the road and only time will tell how this impacts the fediverse. Email had to introduce blocklists as well, so it’s not surprising this also exists.
Email blocklists are based on spam and malware.
I’ve never heard of an email operator refusing to send or deliver SMTP messages to/from a certain provider because too many of its users support the wrong political party.
I haven’t heard of users or instances getting banned/blocked for supporting the wrong political party either unless racism, brigading, CP, and death threats are core tenets of said party, which leads me to believe you may be referring to the Republican party in the US?
As usual, the American can’t see anything beyond their little island, also, in case you didn’t know, tankie servs get routinely defederated, and it’s not for their racism/transphobia or whichever big word is so easy to brandish when angry
So now you also claim to know the private thoughts and motivations of Lemmy instance admins? What a special and unique ability you possess. I’m surprised you’re wasting your telepathic talent on this and not using it to get rich.
it’s called reading around, it’s like watching tiktoks but with text, though it requires some form of context guessing which will be a challenge since the conversations you can read online are not always directed at you
Well you ‘read around’ when you read my comment so you must be in agreement with me now, no? Isn’t that how it works or do you only believe the things that confirm your preconceived notions?
The fact that you use “TikToks with texts” as your analogy kinda confirms my suspicions that it’s the latter.
There is a need for something like this. Lots of folks here are die-hard free speech defenders, which I completely understand, but some are starting to get into ‘Freeze Peach’ territory side of things. You can’t expect every new Lemmy instance admin to manually research about this nazi instance or that pedo instance everytime, especially with self-hosted hobby projects. If there isn’t anything like this, then admins might as well as start copypasting blocked instances lists from big servers like Lemmy.world or Beehaw.org, which again makes it even less coordinated.
There are plenty of potential for abuse as well. Eventually it has to have some kind of a public wiki where the reason for block can be consulted and have an appeal process with a 3rd party ruling to handle these things.
Nice to see history repeating itself I guess.
Interesting experiment though. I’d like to see how this plays out.
I see where this can be useful, but is this list categorized or at least indicate why a certain instance was added?
It’s different blocking an instance for simply repeated toxic behavior vs political leanings. Sometimes an instance can have both.
Letting new admins know and select categories/tags to block or let through could be an improvement, if it isn’t there already:
- NSFW (sometimes people want a SFW site, like browsing at work)
- NSFL (porn might be okay but not everyone have fond memories of ogrish.com and likes)
- Illegal in X jurisdiction (e.g. CSAM)
- Far right or far left
- Repeated instances of troll / spam bot accounts
- Abandoned by admin
There is no way to specify reasonings for defederation in lemmy right now :(
Thank you. I recently set up my own instance and realized the need for tools that can assist in managing.
Disgusting. Let’s defederate with everyone whose ideology my echo chamber disagrees with111!
And here all I can think is “latter-day saints”
For reasons an other commenter has said, I think things like fediseer are a better solution to this. The way they use for measuring trust is distributed, like Lemmy itself (just fewer instances, because it is not for use directly by thousands of users, but for admins who are fewer).
LCS
That sounds interesting!
and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Does that permanently delete posts? Why would you do that?
Does that permanently delete posts? Why would you do that?
Reduce the footprint of the install. Text posts and comments are negligible but pictures chew through storage.
And does this only delete visual media by default? If not, this is worse than anything reddit has done ever. I frequently save posts and links to myself in the form of links, for later processing. This would mean that by the time I get to it (can easily be years, honestly), it will have disappeared forever.
Not everyone who participates with their own instance can afford storage. Some users might have bandwidth restrictions. It’s the Fediverse. Wild, unpredictable and anyone can participate.
- Always document things you want to keep, never rely on someone else to do it for you.
It doesn’t delete anything that anyone on the instance upvotes, downvotes, comments on, saves, etc. Its mainly a tool for personal instances.
Also, if anyone is interested about fediseer, there are useful resources in this post: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/220288
