Notes on defederation

There's been a lot of drama around how sites choose to block other sites, and some concern (mostly insincere) about mods having to look at problematic sites all day, so here's a little thread on how I do it.

The vast majority of sites in our blocklist just say “edgelord,” and they're detected by a bot, and I have never looked at them. Before you decide that's awful and probably unfair to those poor sites, let's walk through that.

The Federater reports are a prettier front end on a tool we've had access to almost since day one. That tool surfaces new sites for blocking almost continuously, and most of them are tiny. We'd probably never have contact with them, but it's useful to pre-emptively block in case of a dogpiling incident: fewer holes for moles to pop out of makes whac-a-mole easier.

Grabbing the most recent report, it's a site the underlying tool has reported on before so it's already blocked here.

https://federater.github.io/crucible-world.html

It's an easy block: every single site on there is throwing up danger signs. Even without the emoji, I would instablock upon seeing that poast is the most popular site with the admin(s). That's one of the edgelord hubs. Zero normal sites in there at all.

https://federater.github.io/piazza-today.html

This one looks fine as admin, awful on federated. Now, you can't always judge a site on its fedline: some admins don't ever look at it (I peek in on ours now and then), or have signed up with relays without a full understanding of what they're getting – in those cases, just because horrific sites show up, it doesn't mean anybody on that site is actually following those accounts, or is even aware it's showing on federated.

Federating with the bad guys is still bad (there are some “secondhand smoke” effects), but fixable. When a site blocks based on “federating with the usual suspects,” it doesn't usually mean they just show on the fedline, but that there's interaction, a reason to think they're fellow-travellers.

In this case, it's a single-user site so that's all him. (And yep, I checked the site before blocking, because it still might be a false positive.)

We're not big enough to show up in public Federater reporting yet, but I know what we look like on the back end right now: popular-with-admin top sites are mastodon.art and wirebird.com (our status page). Next time we get sampled it will probably be a little more spicy, since I've been interacting with other admins recently, including a couple I later suspended (for not handling the spamming I was asking about).

Our top sites in federated are mastodon.online, mas.to, mastodon.lol, wandering.shop... and mastodonapp.uk. That last one is problematic, in a non-obvious way. A lot of other sites have defederated from them, and it's probably one of the first orders of business our board will take up, when we have one. A lot of suspensions are easy-peasy, but a lot also take manual consideration.

And that's about all there is to it.

(correction: since I started writing that this afternoon, we showed up because I posted to the fediblock hashtag. Still clean! https://federater.github.io/artisan-chat.html )