Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

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This is true to an extent, but the problem with Mastodon is that you have to be really careful about who you federate with. Hosting your own Mastodon is like hosting your own email in that unless you set up your anti-spam capabilities perfectly, you will get permanently blackholed by the wider community.

Except it's not just spam. Most of the wider fediverse will block your instance if you federate with instances that host nazis, child porn, etc. Which means the first thing you need to do when setting up your instance is gather a list of all those types and block them. Sure, you can say you're committed to "free speech" or whatever, but if all the large servers slam the door in your face your users will have nobody to talk to.

Also, with the way Mastodon works, if your instance federates with another, your instance hosts a cached copy of all of their stuff that appears on your users' timelines. Which means you might run afoul of your host's TOS or even local laws. If you're in Germany and some American nazi's post saying "kill the Jews" gets federated onto your instance, you might be looking at serious legal trouble. Or even if you're not in one of those countries, you might get booted off AWS or Azure for hosting content against their TOS.

So sure, it's as easy enough as any other webapp to launch into your infra, but maintaining a functioning Mastodon instance that doesn't get blocked by the wider fediverse or brings down the wrath of your hosting company or law enforcement on you is hard.

I don't understand the "why" behind the second paragraph. (In contrast, you explain the tech more for the third paragraph.) To do a callback to the first paragraph, this is very unlike email: my email server barely has a working spam filter and explicitly will never actively reject email (or just organizes and tags it differently), and yet I am able to send and receive email from large hosts (or at least could until I lost my ancient IP address due to my colo provider moving to a different state, for which I weep; but that is an entirely unrelated issue, afaik ;P), as who else I email is none of their business. What about the tech of Mastadon makes other nodes refuse to "federate with" me if I "federate with" something they don't like?

No technical reasons, just the social mores of the wider community.

Go to any large instance, hit up their about section and look at their list of banned servers: a good chunk of them have ban reasons like "'free speech' server that federates with gab and other nazis", etc.

Sure, but your comment is the first time I have heard anyone in these discussions describe a transitive ban... how do they even know who else I federate with, and why do they care?

Its mostly a culture thing. Mastodon has built a culture of aggressively protecting users because a lot of people are there because they received abuse through other platforms which refused to ban serial abusers.

Whether that's good or bad is a different discussion, but the fact is that it's resulted in some fairly aggressive federation policies. In general, people on mastodon are pretty okay with this because they value their personal safety and comfort over "free speech" ideals.

The thinking is that your instance has the right to moderate and federate however you want. Having posts from your server federated into mine is a privilege and totally at my discretion. If your server federates with hate speech servers and you don't intend to change that, I'm going to block you to prevent anything from the hate speech server from reaching mine.

The overall goal is to protect users first and allow free speech second. Mastodon users want a safe and friendly place to have fun and hang out. It's meant to be a place to escape from free speech hellholes like Twitter.

So servers defederate quickly and aggressively. Whether or not defederating from your server causes you problems is very strictly a "you" problem. The safety and comfort of users is paramount.

And the ones that ban Nazis are generally fine with leftists that hate Jews

Basically if you block both left and right wing hatred and CP you're alone in the Fedi lmao

The Fedi is like 4chan but worse, and normies think it's going to be better than Twitter even though it's worse in literally every aspect that they're upset about Twitter: petty censorship by server admins, horrible content, and identity verification are all -worse- on federated networks

    What about the tech of Mastadon makes other nodes refuse to "federate with" me if I "federate with" something they don't like?

Nothing. The blocking situation on the fediverse is arcane at best.

Imagine allowing everyone to register an account on your email server. Now you have people maybe sending stuff to other email addresses on other email servers that's maybe 'problematic'. In the case of email it's not a big deal, but with the fediverse it's different. Instances usually have at least a set of basic rules (e.g. no to nazism), and will block instances that don't also follow them because they don't want to see swastikas on their home feed.

In practice this basically means that while the fediverse is decentralized and all that cool stuff, it's made up of two main groups of instances ('free speech' ones and not 'free-speech') that don't wanna have anything to do with each other. Self hosting an instance for yourself without blocking anything may work, but the second you open it to the public, questionable people are gonna join and retweet questionable stuff from other instances. If you don't take action you're gonna get blocked, and if you take action you're gonna have to eventually de-federate with these problematic instances yourself.

> 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.

I apologize, I tried to answer a broader question and somehow kinda missed the main point.

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.

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