tags.pub has unsubscribed from all open relays.
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tags.pub has unsubscribed from all open relays. Evan recognises there's a mismatch of expectations on what Relay 2 relay, R2R connections should be like.
It should not have taken as long as it did but it's done. However this is ultimately a stop gap and not a full solution. What was asked for was an opt-in solution because there is value in having relays of relays.
So on the tags.pub issue, how should R2R relays gain consent?🧵
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tags.pub has unsubscribed from all open relays. Evan recognises there's a mismatch of expectations on what Relay 2 relay, R2R connections should be like.
It should not have taken as long as it did but it's done. However this is ultimately a stop gap and not a full solution. What was asked for was an opt-in solution because there is value in having relays of relays.
So on the tags.pub issue, how should R2R relays gain consent?🧵
@OliviaVespera it seems to me that it was Evan's expectations that did not match much of Fedi's.
I appreciate that my push has (eventually) resulted in tags.pub (temporarily) ceasing its opt-out model of consent. I'll take that as a promising step.
But what is the problem this service is actually solving, and is it really a problem, or is this a "tech fix for tech fix's sake"?
I understand that single-user instances can't follow hashtags the way larger instances can. How many single-user instances—which are, by definition, one (likely more tech-savvy) user—are there?
Evan's "solution" pissed off a *lot* of people on established instances. Like, I haven't seen a defed response that swift and unified since the Japanese hacker group Discord bot attacks I fought a couple years ago.
We already have a workable solution (that anyone who runs their own instance should be able to implement), and I've been opted-in to it for years. A Fedi directory of accounts who post on specific hashtags. I'm listed for like a dozen different tags with a couple different directories, and people find me (and others) through those follow-lists that can be easily imported.
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So how should Opt-in work with R2R?
Should it be that the source instance must explicitly register or give permission to the secondary relay?
Should it be the job of the primary relay to explicitly register with the secondary relay?
Should it be the job of the secondary relay to explicitly flag itself as a relay to the primary relay and send a relay request message to the primary relay?
How should the primary relay handle that permission?
@OliviaVespera From my point of view this can only be achieved by looking at the actor's profile. There are (often) already the two fields
discoverableandindexable. When at least one these is set tofalse, then one can safely assume that they don't want their content to be spread out.Also I suggest a new XEP that defines a field where users can directly control whether their content should be distributed by relay services at all. And in the absence of this field the other two can be used. Then the users are in control and don't need some quirky solutions like placing a tag in their bio.
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@OliviaVespera it seems to me that it was Evan's expectations that did not match much of Fedi's.
I appreciate that my push has (eventually) resulted in tags.pub (temporarily) ceasing its opt-out model of consent. I'll take that as a promising step.
But what is the problem this service is actually solving, and is it really a problem, or is this a "tech fix for tech fix's sake"?
I understand that single-user instances can't follow hashtags the way larger instances can. How many single-user instances—which are, by definition, one (likely more tech-savvy) user—are there?
Evan's "solution" pissed off a *lot* of people on established instances. Like, I haven't seen a defed response that swift and unified since the Japanese hacker group Discord bot attacks I fought a couple years ago.
We already have a workable solution (that anyone who runs their own instance should be able to implement), and I've been opted-in to it for years. A Fedi directory of accounts who post on specific hashtags. I'm listed for like a dozen different tags with a couple different directories, and people find me (and others) through those follow-lists that can be easily imported.
Answering this part:
> I understand that single-user instances can't follow hashtags the way larger instances can. How many single-user instances—which are, by definition, one (likely more tech-savvy) user—are there?
... not to take any particular position but because I happen to have the data, and it may (or may not) be useful in this conversation.
* There are at least 3,748 Mastodon instances with one active user (3,734 users total on these)
* There are at least 6,747 Mastodon instances with <= 10 active users (15,101 users total on these)
* There are at least 7,756 Mastodon instances with <= 100 active users (49,550 users total on these)Notes:
This is out of at lest 666,365 active Mastodon users on at least 8,224 instances
User counts are self-reported from these instances via 'nodeinfo'. "active" here is the self-reported monthly active users
I say "at least" as not all Mastodon servers choose to report statistics
I am only looking at Mastodon instances here because I know that Mastodon supports the feature of subscribing to hashtags and am less familiar with what other fediverse software supports. There are other complications in the data, for example, it is likely that many or most gotosocial instances are single-user or otherwise small, but gotosocial does not report user user counts by default. Most instances that report a single user are actually wordpress or ghost, but I'm not sure whether those are relevant to this conversation.
Probably known to those in this conversation, but for others reading this: subscribing to hashtags works fundamentally differently than following accounts. The simplified version is: when you follow an account, that account's instance lets your instance know about posts by that account. When you subscribe to a hashtag, no such thing happens, since the hashtag does not "live" on any instance. Instead, what happens is that your instance shows you all posts with that hashtag that it has found out about for other reasons; this is most commonly because those posts were made by an account followed by someone on your instance, or were boosted by such an account. Thus, the fewer users on your instance, the lower fraction of posts with a particular hashtag you will tend to see.
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The problem of course as always is there's no way of enforcing bad actors from creating evil relays that pretend to be human accounts. But that's always been the case.
@OliviaVespera we should also have a way for individuals to go against their instance wishes. That is not adding bunch of tags in profile.
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