Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JonathonW 1319 days ago
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.
2 comments
lstodd 1319 days ago
Reminds me of the FidoNet nodelist. And the proliferation of alternate FTN networks back then.

It's actually a nice solution.

link
nells 1319 days ago
That’s good in theory, but in reality it really is the same list for all popular nodes, making it effectively a centralised blacklist.
link
ceejayoz 1319 days ago
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.

link
ilyt 1319 days ago
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

link
mftrhu 1319 days ago
> 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.

link
OctopusLupid 1319 days ago
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).

link