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Bubbles and allowlists

Nat writes:

My experience with the big names in community moderation on the fediverse has been that while they don’t always get it right, they’re right often enough to be useful.

Pooling moderation efforts together is a good idea.

My take on a lot of their moderation calls is that it makes sense for their instance and I agree with the call for their instance. For example an instance with many users of a vulnerable group would usually need to have a lower threshold for instance-blocking than an instance with fewer users to protect since the fewer users you yourself have, the better you can respond to attacks on them.

I’d prefer a whitelist instance, anyway, and if I ever do get around to setting up my own instance that’s how I plan on running it.

I’m not into that, and that is one of the biggest qualms I have against Threads (it's not the only problem with Threads!). I mean, I can see some usecases for it for very specialized instances so don’t take this as a generally applicable kibosh, but when I have the typical instance in mind, thinking of it being allowlist based makes me 😱. To me that kinda breaks the whole appeal of federation in the first place and it punishes small instances and affords a trend towards fewer and bigger instances, and I don’t want that.

But destroy “The Whole Known Network”

Mastodon had this idea of a tab of “The Whole Known Network” or “The Federated Timeline”. I hate that idea. You’re widely republishing and advertising all kinds of weird stuff without vetting it. Not into it.

They even have a specific level of block that’s milder than a normal block called “silencing” which means posts don’t show up on that “federated timeline”. Even just “silencing” instances is considered controversial. (That level of free speech entitlement is a li'l absurd even to me. 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Silencing is different from blocking in that you can still follow people and you can still see replies from them, replies from them still show up in your threads.

I hate this “federated timeline”. I went through absurd lengths trying to remove it from my li’l instance with some mad hacks; the hacks didn’t work very wells and the hacks also caused other bugs so when Akkoma finally introduced a supported way of removing that tab, that was a huge sigh of relief from me and I instantly applied it.

It’s like I’ve “silenced” the entire Fediverse. Good riddance.

Bubble timeline

Akkoma also has a bubble timeline which is like an allowlisted “federated timeline”. You pick a couple of charming instances and you have a timeline of known posts from them. You can have both a bubble timeline and a normal federated timeline, or neither, or just one of them, and I went with just the bubble timeline. I like it, even though on my instance the bubble timeline is pretty useless since it still only shows posts it knows about, and I don’t follow very many people and neither do my friends on my instance. That’s sad and maybe I should subscribe to some sorta relay but on the other hand I don’t wanna break my dinky li’l VPS.

So I feel like I get the best of both worlds: allowlisting in what posts my instance promotes but normal blocklisting for people who need to actually reply and get in touch.