Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@Ember @vkc Sorry, but this has a bit of a "if you block someone and get harassed for it, it's your fault because you're on a node that's not doing a good job" vibes to me. I'd be a lot happier if we didn't provide potential footguns to people.

Also, I'm not even sure your argument works. If I'd be an instance admin wanting to do a decent job, I wouldn't even know how to protect my users. mastodon.social only has one instance blocked for blockbots according to their list, so that's not a good starting point. A lot of "decent instances" don't publicly explain why they block other instances, or don't show that info at all. If I, for example, would trust your decisions fully, I couldn't even follow your lead because you don't make server blocks publicly available. Same with Hachyderm. That also means a user couldn't evaluate block decisions before joining a server to make sure they're on a node that is "decent". In the end, it's all just vibes based, and that puts a lot of people at risk without them even knowing.

There's a ton of instances that are run by really awesome people, but they don't have the bandwidth to stay on top of the latest malicious instances all the time. And those are commonly also the kind of instances that host a lot of non-tech users, which makes this even riskier.

I get it, it's a hard problem to solve, but this is one of those many things where Mastodon puts users at risk without even telling them or allowing them to make a decision on their own. I don't like that. And if we rightfully throw shit at Bluesky, we should also at least acknowledge the limitations in our own courts.

@vkc a similar thing is true for Mastodon. the UI doesn't show it, but your server will send the other server a note saying that you blocked that user.

since you run your own server, you can get a list of who blocked you with a query like

SELECT accounts.username, accounts.domain
FROM blocks
JOIN accounts ON blocks.account_id = accounts.id
WHERE
  target_account_id = (
    SELECT id
    FROM accounts
    WHERE
      username = 'vkc'
      AND private_key IS NOT NULL
      LIMIT 1
  );

this is documented, and while the official UI doesn't show it, a malicious actor could easily build tooling on their own server.

don't ask me why, I don't know either. while there probably are ui-niceties around it (mainly that the other node can make sure they don't show the user you've blocked your content), this... isn't great.