[dustedcodes]

I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the RSS-verse.

[xg15]

Also very new to this still, but from what I got so far, #fediblock is first and foremost just a hashtag. It's "well known" and there is a convention behind it, but it doesn't have any specific technical effects - i.e., you can't just remote control another server's blocklist by tooting #fediblock.

If your server's admin(?) makes a fediblock toot, that's more an statement that your own server has blocked someone and asks other servers to do the same. Admins of the other servers can always decide how to deal with that signal - ignore, issue the same block, boost the signal, etc. (Though there is probably some "peer-pressure"/reputation management at work, which makes their decisions not completely free)

So the "network-wide ban" really isn't. It's more a ban from the vast majority of the network - but there is no technical way to issue a genuine ban from all Mastodon instances, the way you can e.g. get banned from the entirety of Reddit.

That at least seems more democratic to me. Of course the usual pitfalls of democratic systems still apply: How to deal with bad-faith #fediblock signals? How to avoid hidden centralisation where certain instances gain more authority to issue blocks than others? etc...

If someone more experienced has some articles with more details about how the system works, that would be really cool.

[luckylion]

I'd imagine the peer-pressure to be very large. In the world of private torrent trackers, you have a similar setup. Each tracker is independent in general, but there is the cabal, a group of elite trackers that dominate their vertical in pretty much all metrics, and are connected via staff knowing each other. You misbehave on one cabal-tracker bad enough, you're gone from all of them.

Lower tier trackers will often adapt the cabal's decisions for various reasons. You end up with a situation where one staff member making a decision can end your membership on a dozen sites.

In the torrent world, it's pretty open. I expect the same to be the case on the fediverse, even if it's not publicly communicated. I'm sure server admins do communicate with each other in non-public forms.

[csande17]

> Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow.

Mastodon servers do often have a "federated timeline" that shows you all the posts from servers your instance knows about. People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you.

> Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse?

I don't think there's really a single person with the authority to ban someone from the whole fediverse; your instance admins always have the final say about whether their instance talks to another instance. But things like shared blocklists mean that, in the vast majority of unambiguous spam or illegal content cases, only one person actually has to respond to them directly.

[xigoi]

> People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you.

You can deal with that by blocking them personally. No need for a guardian angel.

[lupire]

You can't block everyone bad because you don't know who they are until after they spam you. Last month I got 100 spam texts from the same sender ([Redacted] Political Party) using a different phone number for each.

[JonathonW]

There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers.

There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.

[lstodd]

Reminds me of the FidoNet nodelist. And the proliferation of alternate FTN networks back then.

It's actually a nice solution.

[nells]

That’s good in theory, but in reality it really is the same list for all popular nodes, making it effectively a centralised blacklist.

[ceejayoz]

Sure, just like the guy who poops in the produce section gets banned from all the local grocery stores.

Freedom sometimes means no one wants to talk to you.

[ilyt]

It quickly becomes "that moderator decided he doesn't like their worldviews and put it on banlist now 100s of servers subscribe to".

That kind of list needs pretty good moderation to avoid that. Also, it's not really that effective considering offenders can easily move servers.

Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech

[mftrhu]

> Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech

Nah. De-federating is manual. Such an adversarial group would need to join up, start spamming, and keep on spamming long enough for their instance to be added to a blacklist, and for other admins to pull that blacklist in, without the admin ever acting in the meantime.

It's not like the fediverse is that big, either - people talk to each other.

[OctopusLupid]

There is no mechanism currently to subscribe to a blocklist. Some forks allow exporting/importing block lists as CSVs, but that is manual.

Am new admin for a friend-only instance; currently blocking seems to be done via user reports + checking in on the #Fediblock hashtag. It's all manual, and repeated admin work needs to be done per-instance, which is why the article says it's inefficient but a good trade-off (so you can choose the server you align with best).