Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model?
Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model?
Looks like someone really kicked the hornet's nest recently on mastodon by announcing (not even deploying) a Mastodon-BlueSky bridge. Just take a look at the github comments here to get an idea of how this was received. Plenty of people way more experienced than myself have weighted on this issue so...
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A very interesting idea! Actually it seems to me there are two interesting ideas here:
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endorsements. Something like this (whether it's from feeler servers or other sources) is clearly needed to make consent-based federation scale. IndieWeb's Vouch protocol and the "letters of introduction" Erin Shephard discusses in "A better moderation system is possible for the social web" are similar approaches. You could also imagine building endorsement logic on top of an instance catalog like the FediSeer (of The Bad Space) or infrastructure like FIRES.
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restricting visibility of a boost to servers the original post is federated with. This is something that's long overdue in the fediverse! Akkoma's bubble is a somewhat-similar concept; Bonfire's boundaries might well support this.
Something else to chip in here in terms of interesting ideas, specifically regarding "protected/limited (leashed?) boost", there's some angles to this that the Glitch fork of Mastodon seems near in terms of local only posts and hiding boosts from specific people.
On their own these features don't amount to what OP's describing, but I think they may offer some groundwork for ways to work out the "limited boost" idea. Also, the more I think on it, the more I kind of like Leashed/Moored as a description over protected, as I think it more clearly implies controlled reach of posts, but maybe that's just me.
Agreed, and a very good point. "Visible to people on allow-list servers" is very much along the lines of local-only posts ("visible to people only on this server"). I think of it as "scoped" visibility, although leashed or moored might well be a better term.
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