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Top-level
Jerry Bell :verified_paw: :donor: :verified_dragon: :rebelverified:​

@Crell it's antithetical to what the fediverse is intended to be, but it is a reasonable solutiion to this problem

56 comments
Larry Garfield

@jerry Sadly, I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that a "wild west libertarian self-organizing environment" (the dream of the early-90s Internet) will devolve into a Nazi troll farm 100% of the time with absolute certainty.

It's a wonderful idea, but doomed.

The barrier to the accept-list could be low (eg, do they have a halfway decent TOS/CoC), but I don't think we have an alternative.

cf: peakd.com/community/@crell/why

Arquinsiel Teknogrot

@Crell @jerry I think the idea that an otherwise terrible person had like 20 years ago holds up pretty well: paying for initial access results in you having an investment in a service that encourages you to follow the rules to protect that investment. You can see this with how Something Awful has turned into a stable and mature forum with varied subforums and at least one thread for anything you can think of.

Of course the downside to that is that if the person setting the rules is terrible then the culture will be terrible and require a coup to fix, but... that seems to be a universal part of the human condition.

@Crell @jerry I think the idea that an otherwise terrible person had like 20 years ago holds up pretty well: paying for initial access results in you having an investment in a service that encourages you to follow the rules to protect that investment. You can see this with how Something Awful has turned into a stable and mature forum with varied subforums and at least one thread for anything you can think of.

Larry Garfield

@teknogrot @jerry "The culture of an organization is defined as the worst behavior its leadership is willing to tolerate."

No amount of federation will change that dynamic.

Arquinsiel Teknogrot

@Crell I think it does change it, but not for the better. As @jerry pointed out, the nature of the fediverse can hide the behaviour from some people resulting in a de-facto tolerance of behaviour worse than the leadership (in this case again @jerry) would actually accept, while denying them the tools to do something about it.

Federation may actually not be a good idea at all for social media.

Mark Saltveit

@teknogrot @Crell @jerry
Metafilter has (or had?) a $5 one-time entry fee that served the same purpose pretty well.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry Jerry, firstly, thank you for the thoughtful, nuanced take. As a person who does somewhat high profile activism, I appreciate that your efforts have resulted in me experiencing very little harassment here.

The problem with having a list of "approved instances" is that it makes personal/tiny instances untenable.

This really reminds me of issues with email hosting and spam control - I run a personal email server and I have problems with providers assuming everyone is a spammer unless they have a history of sending non-spam.

How to establish that history if you can't send, though? If you're a business, you can pay protection money to certain companies that will bootstrap your reputation, but I can't afford that.

APIs for publishing opinions on other instances could help, if consumed "web of trust" style - you'd have two values, how much you trust the instance itself, and how much you trust it's trust decisions. These values might be negative. I'm not sure how well this would work in practice.

@Crell @jerry Jerry, firstly, thank you for the thoughtful, nuanced take. As a person who does somewhat high profile activism, I appreciate that your efforts have resulted in me experiencing very little harassment here.

The problem with having a list of "approved instances" is that it makes personal/tiny instances untenable.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry Meanwhile, yesterday someone went out of their way on the birdsite to tag me in a post calling me an assortment of slurs.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry speaking of the birdsite, before the API got locked down, I spent a fair amount of effort building network analysis tools to proactively identify and block bigots. Turns out assholes like to follow each other.

It was deeply satisfying when news about me came out and a bunch of people who had never interacted with me and weren't on any shared blocklists were complaining about being blocked by me.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry I also had an IFF (identify friend or foe) script that would pull following/follower data, compare against my my own block, mute, following, and follower lists, and compute a score.

Rickd6

@ryanc @jerry @Crell perhaps there’s a way to make this available to members so they can implement it when they sign up?

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Rickd6 @jerry @Crell It's not clear to me that it would work here. Part of the issue is it sounds like the trolls often spin up new disposable instances for trolling purposes and wouldn't have useful data.

Rickd6

@Crell @ryanc @jerry is it possible to ‘fight fire with fire’ in that when someone identifies that they are receiving harassment a group of individuals- obviously a prearranged group- can be contacted who will respond overwhelmingly to the harassing individual to call them out? Sounds childish when said out loud and may make them dig in further but …..

Larry Garfield replied to Rickd6

@Rickd6 @ryanc @jerry "My gang is bigger than your gang" is the approach used in a failed society.

Jerry Bell :verified_paw: :donor: :verified_dragon: :rebelverified:​

@ryanc @Crell I used to work with someone who had this saying "the operation was a success, unfortunately the patient died". I feel like it's that sort of situation - we could indeed solve the problem by killing the patient.

Larry Garfield

@ryanc @jerry The spam analogy is very apt, I think, given Fediverse is often analogized to email.

And the wild-west-anyone-runs-anything approach is largely a failure there, too. I also used to run a personal mail server. It only worked if I proxied every message through my ISP's mail server.

A similar network-of-trust seems the only option here, give or take details.

Larry Garfield

@ryanc @jerry In the abstract sense, we're dealing with the scaling problems of the tit-for-tat experiment dynamics. Reputation-building approaches to social behavior only work when the # of actors is small enough that repeated interactions can build reputation. The Internet is vastly too big for that, just like society at large.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry there's several phd thesis level problems to solve here

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry My big concern with the web of trust model is that it's complicated, and has lots of nontrivial decisions to make. An effective tool would probably have to distill the decision to trust/neutral/distrust and have a standard scoring algorithm, and notify admins of conflicting data.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry I do think keyword/regex filters as a quarantine/alert admin thing would be helpful, but as mentioned up thread, part of the problem is people unkowingly joining instances that don't protect their users from harassment and not understanding why that's a problem. The guides saying "instance doesn't matter much" don't help.

Larry Garfield replied to Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@ryanc @jerry Yeah, the onboarding experience is definitely still a sore point. Like, I'd like to get my brother or the NFP I work with onto Mastodon, but I don't know what server to send them to. Mine isn't appropriate for them, mastodon.social isn't a good answer, and the alternative is... *citation needed*

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag: replied to Larry

@Crell @jerry Yeah, I've absolutely no idea what "general but friendly to members of frequently harassed groups" instances exist. This instance is really nice, as I've always been a hacker first and foremost. Yes, I'm queer on several dimensions and open about it, but most of the time I don't want to focus on that.

Paul_IPv6

@ryanc @Crell @jerry

same same here. run small email server.

while i can sympathize with consumer email providers that block-specific only doesn't scale nearly as well as block-all/allow-only-specific, we hit what you say. how do i prove i'm "clean" if i can't send to you.

i do think we need to have these discussions, possibly be willing to give up some cherished ideals, but most critically, we need to get those most at risk of abuse involved at every stage in discussion/design/test/deploy.

skaphle

@Crell @jerry I wonder, isn't "creating an instance" a barrier? In the sense that a new troll instance, after some time, should be blocked by most other instances and blocklists. Then they have to set up a new one, and so on, and so on.

Also, I guess new people either know people on Mastodon they trust or they go to joinmastodon.org and pick a server. That's kind of an accept-list, no? The barrier to get there is relatively low: joinmastodon.org/covenant

Larry Garfield

@skaphle @jerry Too low, apparently.

And with tools like Mastohost, setting up an attack instance is quite easy.

Always assume that malicious actors are willing to put in more work than benevolent actors. They're more motivated.

Jonathan Yu

@jerry @Crell In the early days of IRC (I wasn't there for it), my understanding was that EFnet was meant to be similar - allow any server to join - and hence their name Eris Free Net. But they've since changed their policy given the risks, and I think that's one of few reasonable approaches. Increasing the friction for everyone sucks, but it disproportionately hurts trolls, so I guess it may be worthwhile?

Imogen

@jawnsy

EFNet stands for Eris Free Network. Eris is / was eris.berkeley.edu who got booted from the network for controversial behavior.

EFNet was very cliquish and was known as a good old boy’s network.

The one thing the developers got right was Glines (Global blocking).

I hope you enjoyed this short history lesson.

jz.tusk

@jerry @Crell

I really appreciate your top post - it clarified a lot for me.

I'm a total noob to the Fediverse, so I don't know what core tenet goes against using allow lists as opposed to deny lists. Is there an easy answer you can give me?

Jerry Bell :verified_paw: :donor: :verified_dragon: :rebelverified:​

@jztusk @Crell I think this reply is a very good example of why that would be a problem: mk.aleteoryx.me/notes/9wexilu5

Basically, the fediverse is premised on the idea of many people running their own personal instance, and in adopting an allow-list model, we effectively make it difficult or impossible for these individual instances to participate.

Jaz (IFTAS)

@jerry @jztusk @Crell

Why not both? Some servers can run open federation, some can run allowlist-only, some can run in quarantine-first mode, and over time I'm sure we'll see shared lists, reputation signals, and trusted upstream servers to help manage the onboarding/allowing.

"Disallow all, but allow all servers already allowed by x, y and z" is one way to approach.

Almost none of the asks I've seen are either/or propositions, they are generally admin options to enable or not.

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell
@jsit was talking about this the other day, and I keep feeling like I shot this idea down too soon...

social.coop/@jsit/112876102135

...but maybe that would be a good plan for some of these new and small instances, especially the ones that are trying to be safe spaces for minority groups. Get some momentum going, get some connections with other servers, get some contact with other server staffs, maybe eventually open it up.

Yeah, I think a federated whitelist would be a good idea.

Still, I'm looking at how many of these groups making block lists purport to be going after bigotry and harassment or whatever, but then you see them blocking a bunch of queer instances or black instances or something, and I wonder who might actually be trusted with this sort of thing. I can even imagine TechHub and Infosec showing up because someone with list access doesn't like the "techbros" or whatever...

@jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell
@jsit was talking about this the other day, and I keep feeling like I shot this idea down too soon...

social.coop/@jsit/112876102135

...but maybe that would be a good plan for some of these new and small instances, especially the ones that are trying to be safe spaces for minority groups. Get some momentum going, get some connections with other servers, get some contact with other server staffs, maybe eventually open it up.

Jay 🎃🕷️🦇👻

@Raccoon @jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell The refrain of “allowlists/blocklists are bad because it means you won’t hear from me” misses the point: This is why they are GOOD.

People don’t have a “right” to talk to your instance, this is a privilege that should be EARNED. And the protection of vulnerable people on social media is more important than my ability to make sure they can see my dumb posts.

This is not antithetical to the Fediverse. Choosing which instances to federate with is central to it!

Jay 🎃🕷️🦇👻

@Raccoon @jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell Because I am not among a group that is a frequent target of abuse, I have the privilege of enjoying the benefits of being on an “open” instance without having to worry about the drawbacks. I will probably always prefer to be on an instance that is blocklist-based instead of allowlist-based. But many people do not have that privilege.

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@jsit @jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell
> "Because I am not among a group that is a frequent target of abuse, I have the privilege of enjoying the benefits of being on an “open” instance without having to worry about the drawbacks."

But here's the flip side of that, one of the main things that makes people a bit squeamish about this: because you're not a member of a marginalized group, you haven't been on a server that has been brigaded with false reports trying to get the mainstream to block you, and then suddenly find a bunch of other marginalized groups' servers have blocked you without checking up on those reports. This is one of the things we keep seeing between queer fedi and black fedi.

What's to stop a member of one group, bigoted towards another, from getting in here and keeping servers that should be on the list off of it?

It then becomes a question of who will bell the cat: who will take on the responsibility, and thus open themselves up to abuse, of maintaining this?

@jsit @jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell
> "Because I am not among a group that is a frequent target of abuse, I have the privilege of enjoying the benefits of being on an “open” instance without having to worry about the drawbacks."

But here's the flip side of that, one of the main things that makes people a bit squeamish about this: because you're not a member of a marginalized group, you haven't been on a server that has been brigaded with false reports trying to get the mainstream to block you, and then...

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@jsit @jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell
And this post here also summarizes the big problems we've seen with FediBlock and The Bad Space.

We have people posting marginalized group instances on FediBlock, misrepresenting or exaggerating or even fabricating issues with those instances, and then suddenly finding that like 10% of the network has blocked them because no one is vetting these posts. I recently even appeared on there for attempting to vet some of those posts.

Meanwhile, every issue that The Bad Space has has basically turned into a timeline nightmare for its creators. Yeah, TBS has a problem with the number of instances it calls out for "racism" that no one else can find, and we could always make the argument that they could respond differently, but some people go absolutely insane about the people running it.

With a whitelist it would be even worse, because simply not including a server is doing a very real harm to its connections, and someone is going to answer for that.

@jsit @jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell
And this post here also summarizes the big problems we've seen with FediBlock and The Bad Space.

We have people posting marginalized group instances on FediBlock, misrepresenting or exaggerating or even fabricating issues with those instances, and then suddenly finding that like 10% of the network has blocked them because no one is vetting these posts. I recently even appeared on there for attempting to vet some of those posts.

Jay 🎃🕷️🦇👻

@Raccoon Yes, who decides what to put on an allowlist/blocklist and what are the criteria they use continues to be a fraught problem with no simple solution.

But I was countering the claim a lot of people make that shared allowlists/blocklists in principle -- even if "perfectly curated" -- are antithetical to the Fediverse, which I think isn't true.

Some people bristle at the idea of these lists not because they think they might not be perfect, but because they want a nearly 100% open Fedi.

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon: replied to Jay

@jsit
I think you're talking about people who aren't in the conversation though: everyone who would be involved in this thread maintains a substantial block list, even if we have different standards for it. No one here is going to suggest a 100% open Fedi.

Our issue is the number of new and marginalized instances that are going to find a chunk of the network cut off by this sort of thing. We want new servers to be made, and we want those servers to thrive, because new servers add new life to the network, and a very important part of both of all of that is that good posts need to be able to spread far and wide and fast.

The Content Must Flow.

How does one create a new marginalized instance in an environment where instances with great content from marginalized groups is going to be cut off from them for however long it takes to get on the list? How do we let people on these new instances know more content will come, and why would they join a server that's blocked off?

@jsit
I think you're talking about people who aren't in the conversation though: everyone who would be involved in this thread maintains a substantial block list, even if we have different standards for it. No one here is going to suggest a 100% open Fedi.

Our issue is the number of new and marginalized instances that are going to find a chunk of the network cut off by this sort of thing. We want new servers to be made, and we want those servers to thrive, because new servers add new life to the...

Jay 🎃🕷️🦇👻 replied to Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@Raccoon I think maybe part of my confusion is not fully understanding how allowlists work. Can someone on a LIMITED_FEDERATION_MODE instance be *followed by* someone on a non-allowlisted instance?

For instance (heh), limited.example is in limited federation mode with only safe.example in its allowlist.

Someone on unknown.example wants to follow @ user @ limited.example. Can they do this?

#MastoAdmin #FediblockMeta

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon: replied to Jay

@jsit
As someone who doesn't deal with that directly, I forget that we have options like that. That is a good question, because if that's the case, it changes the nature of how disconnected these instances would be.

Jay 🎃🕷️🦇👻 replied to Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@Raccoon I have a test instance that I will enable limited federation on.

I would love to know if there are any big instances that do this already.

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell @jsit
It also occurs to me that this can't be run by the instances using it, because they won't be able to see new instances to whitelist, which means you're going to need a few large servers to be the "Canary in the coal mine" for these instances. I feel like Tech Hub, with our somewhat squeamish block policies, could be a really useful server here, and I'd be happy to help maintain such a list.

What I think we need is some framework for how this list is put together and maintained, without too much overhead. We would need to account for the fact that such a list needs to be absolutely huge, and that while it should prioritize safety, there is an ethical obligation to get as many servers on it as possible.

As I told Jsit, it might be useful for someone to make this list now, just so we can see what it looks like.

@jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell @jsit
It also occurs to me that this can't be run by the instances using it, because they won't be able to see new instances to whitelist, which means you're going to need a few large servers to be the "Canary in the coal mine" for these instances. I feel like Tech Hub, with our somewhat squeamish block policies, could be a really useful server here, and I'd be happy to help maintain such a list.

Larry Garfield

@jaz @jerry @jztusk I think we collectively need to come to terms with the fact that most people have no interest, desire, skill, or inclination to run their own anything, and will happily make it someone else's problem in return for money, ad data, or just not GAF.

Less than 0.1% of people will run their own mail/Fedi/Identity/app/file server.

We need to stop making fetch happen. It's not going to happen.

Jaz (IFTAS)

@Crell @jerry @jztusk (Back of napkin caveat)

Currently seeing one server per 500 accounts. Writ large that's 10M AP servers for 5B accounts.

Several hundred million not-WP.com WordPress sites might offer an example. Value-add hosting options abound for WordPress, so it's partially self-hosted insofar as it's somewhat self-managed by tens of millions.

Mix of managed, shared, and self-hosting for AP services coupled with a rich plugin framework is how I imagine adoption could be supported.

jz.tusk

@Crell @jaz @jerry

I think it's better to come up with better tooling that lets a small admin set up and maintain their trust relationships, and just make sure that they know that part of running their own instance means spending some time on that.

The street buskers in my city take Swipe. That's the model I like

maybenot

@jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell

so, quarantining new instances (increased scrutiny / aggressive automatic moderation / keyword flagging) after which they would be put on either block- or allow-lists?

this would (theoretically) not preclude small instance participation, and would increase cost/difficulty for bad actors.

different instances could have their own metrics/rules for this, as you say giving a variety of perspectives on the new one's behavior

maybenot

@jaz @jerry @jztusk @Crell

then the decisions of known/old/large ones can be weighted by everyone to make their own decisions

this leads logically to some kind of web-of-trust / instance-reputation-scoring system down the line. this can be both good and bad, but if surfaced somehow could serve as a direly needed instance selection aid for new users.

ie: example.net is aggressively blocking this type of behaviour, but is above average blocked by others on this other metric

jz.tusk

@jaz @jerry @Crell

I *so* want to come up with an "algebra of trust", where we can say "I trust entity X, but only to post", and "I trust entity Y, and anybody they trust too", and let the computer figure out each individual "do I trust A to do B?".

I haven't formalized it at all, and there's a risk of being computationally expensive, and someone would have to do the specialization for Mastodon, but I'd love to see it.

Larry Garfield

@jztusk @jaz @jerry You're trying to solve a human problem with math. That is doomed to failure, no matter what the crypto-bros keep selling.

All human systems require human maintenance and decision making. Assisted, maybe, but never, ever think you can replace human decision making about human activities.

maybenot

@Crell @jztusk @jaz @jerry

one could make the argument that this would be a machine only enforcing the decisions made by a human, like a very advanced filter

jz.tusk

@Crell @jaz @jerry

The humans set the base rules.

Have you ever unwrapped the certificate chain for an HTTPS-transmitted web page? We're doing stuff like this right now, on massive web scale

Jaz (IFTAS)

@jerry @Crell

>it's antithetical to what the fediverse is intended to be

I believe many see the Fediverse as way to build an alternative that is both safe and open.

"No Nazis" is not 100% open, it is opinionated and less-than-fully-open. Safe beats open in the case of nazis, right?

Many of these issues come down to which to prioritise, safe, or open?

My preference is safety first, open second.

Both are good, but sometimes we need to give a little bit on the open to preserve safety.

feld
@jerry @Crell closed federation systems tend to shrink over time and become their own thing, at least from what I've noticed over the years.
Johnny Peligro 🍅

ah! so the solution is, in the end, twitter 2 essentially

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