People wondering why I'm so focused on defederation might not be aware that on a very large server with tons of users, a Jewish member was being harassed by holocaust-deniers and toxic bros.
I investigate, and every single one of the domain names was on our Tier 0 list (the basic consensus blocks).
Additionally, the 3 or 4 domain names in screenshots were on fediblock for months.
This is why I'm obsessed with defederation lists. That user should never have been targeted by known bad actors.
"There's more to moderation than defederation."
Yes, there is, but if you don't pre-empt and defederate servers who think it's *fun to harass and abuse people* you'll be spending a lot more time moderating and playing whack-a-mole.
@oliphant I very much appreciate your efforts to maintain domain blocklists. There are a surprising (to me) number of servers that seem to have as their primary purpose to hurt others, and having a shared resource to block them all rather than having to encounter them one at a time is amazing. Thank you!
The only thing that makes me nervous at all is that I'm on a large server that seems to be mis-identified as a bad actor every now and then, and most people committed to defederation as a first resort are very much in the "defederate first and never ask or answer questions later" camp. I've developed a knee-jerk response to people praising defederation because of that, which, to be fair, is almost certainly the same impulse motivating those who use defederation itself as a tool to hurt others.
So my nightmare scenario is that someone with write access to a widely-used shared blocklist decides they don't like the admin of my instance personally, or whatever, and boom, we're all cut off, 25K users blocked from basically the entire Mastodon chunk of the fediverse, with no recourse for appeal.
There's a tension there, where "known bad actors" seems really obvious in most cases, but apparently some people "know" things that just aren't true.
