| > Imagine allowing everyone to register an account on your email server. That is not what we are talking about with this sub-thread; the top-level comment carefully argued that people shouldn't do that at all--that you should only host your own accounts and that it undermines the concept to host random people at your domain (which I agree with 100%)--and the comment I am directly responding to buys into the premise and talks about servers my server federates with, not accounts my server itself hosts. > Self hosting an instance for yourself without blocking anything may work... Well, does it? The comment I was responding to claims that, if I host my own Mastadon server--which of course isn't going to let randos get accounts... you can't sign up for an @saurik.com email address either (nor should you be able to)--and then have the gall to merely federate with everyone everywhere, I will get blocked by common big servers. I don't see why or even how this would be the case, but maybe Mastadon has some weird technical thing allowing this kind of weird transitive block which I don't understand. I am thereby trying to get some kind of explanation for how this works and then why people would go out of their way to do it once they figured out how, as it seems ridiculous to me, and I am using the same analogy used for hosting one's own email server to show why. For avoidance of any doubt, the claim I am responding to--the thesis of the "second paragraph" that I say needed to have more explanation--was that "most of the wider fediverse will block your instance if you federate with instances that host nazis, child porn, etc.". Do you, I guess, disagree with this (and thereby agree with me and my complaint/confusion)? Again: this has nothing to do with letting people sign up for accounts on my server. |
If you host your own Mastadon server, you can federate with everyone. Other servers will only block you if you interact with the nazis, child porn, et cetera. If you keep the problematic content read-only then it's gonna be fine. You can hide the list of federated/blocked servers, so no one will know (unless of course, again, you re-tweet, like, or comment something from a specific server).
There is no weird thing allowing transitive blocks, but mind that there are block lists so if your server is inserted in one you will be blocked by a lot of servers at once.