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...
it would be nice to have everything federate everywhere, but small instances just dont have the resources. its untenable for the small scale.
It would make more sense to not just pull everything by default and let instances control how much federated content they want locally and rely on the owner instance to provide the rest on demand.
Some day most people are going to understand that "I want to post something visible to everyone in the world EXCEPT these specific people" is not a viable or reasonable or even possible approach to communication, and any attempts to make it work are doomed to failure.
Which is why everyone gets the option to subscribe to exactly what they want to see and block users on top of that. The ability to actively choose an echo chamber is not a good solution.
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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Great to see the Marco Rogers citation, they really hit the nail on the head about the awkward of the "constant vigilance" approach.
And great ideas too! Something more organised and powerful is sorely needed.
These are some really good thoughts and topics to discuss at this stage in the Fediverse. We must be looking big-picture right now as we move forward. Thanks for pushing the envelope!
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But...why? I don't have a paywall o.O
I meant to make it easier... I can remove if you want it to.
just removed. I meant no harm.
Sounds like you might have something specific in mind? Please elaborate.
Duh, mea magna culpa. Thanks!
Edited to add:
And an interesting blog post, too. The "Feeler" concept and its concentric zones of trust remind me a little of friend-of-a-friend standards which always appealed to me. I'll have to look more into the Fediseer model!
I just stumbled across this post after reading this exact post earlier today while updating my lemmy instance… Absolute genius idea imo. I also promoted your instance somewhere today since I think your values are spot on. Keep up the good work.
Very interesting post, thanks for sharing