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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure which part of federation it is that makes you think there's a reason for them to be selective.

The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable and so that they end up with undesirable content in the local feed. But that's pretty much down to ensuring users act how they otherwise would on any social media, with the expectation it will be seen by the public.

I'm a bit surprised that they allow public access to the federated view of the server [1], because that does mean it potentially could get embarrassing w/respect to people who don't get that the gov. doesn't choose what ends up there, so I'd bet that eventually ends up locked down.

[1] https://social.overheid.nl/public

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The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable

In my mind, the worst case scenario is what we have for e-mail: 99% of Mastodon traffic might become spam. Maybe it's easier to control because Mastodon is a subscription model rather than a targeting model (the recipient is in control of what to receive, not the sender), but you only need one user on an instance to subscribe to a spam instance, and the local feed will be inundated. And that's manageable as long as that happens once or twice a day, but the same incentives that almost destroyed e-mail are still there for Mastodon.

That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take.

>That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "forced to choose which side to take."

You (or anyone else) don't have to have an account on that instance. In fact IIUC, the site linked in the submission only has accounts for the Dutch government and elected officials of that government.

Folks other than that can follow individual accounts on the Dutch government instance, but aren't subject to any moderation decisions made by the site. Only those with accounts on that instance would be affected by blocks/bans of specific users or instances.

And even if the Dutch government instance wants to block other instances from their users, there's nothing stopping Dutch government officials (and/or agencies) from creating accounts on other instances.

As such, please explain what you mean by "choosing a side." I'd expect that this site is on the side of The Netherlands, its government and citizens. Isn't that the way it should be for a site like this?

As such, please explain what you mean.

Edit: Clarified prose. Fixed typo.

The issue is that if they're selective they'll prevent Dutch citizens from following government accounts. Most places it'd be deeply problematic if the government started blocking access for constituents without good reason.

They can (and probably should) only show their federated feed to users of their instance, and they can silence other instances to prevent posts from making it into their federated feed even if someone follows accounts there, but defederation would likely be an extreme last resort for a government server.

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