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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

> No channel modes and no channel operators, which is a decision rather than a gap: a global channel is owned by nobody, so there is nobody to be an operator of it. Blocking is per person and per instance instead

That's completely unworkable. Lets say I create #some_minority, and people from many different servers join. Some shithead comes and starts screaming slurs at us. Now the admin for every server must block that person. Multiply that by every channel, and every admin is responsible for moderating the entire ecosystem. The only way they can do this is with shared blocklists, which have been a nightmare on mastodon.

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If this is really distributed, then off the top of my head I imagine you could possibly make some sort of reputation-based filter list wherein trusted admins can subscrbe to each other's filter lists such that when one admin blocks are user, it quickly propagates to other admins' lists. Somewhat similar to how email domain spam block lists work.

That's basically what they do on mastodon. It sounds like it's a pretty bad system. With a natural, community scoped entity (channel) there is a way more responsive path to moderation.

That would quickly get abused and cartels would form over the larger servers about who has access and where.

Yes, but the point being "trusted". If the community decides a particular admin/group/server is unjustly handing out bans, then they could unsubscribe from that list.

But the server is attached to the channel, and communities form around them.

[seemingly negative thing] which is a decision (after hindsight), rather than a gap [scope creep]

Ownership of namespaces is such a hard problem, our society has had to form global organizations and some of our most secure distributed systems to make it happen.

Working in the p2p space, scalable namespace ownership that doesn't get instantly ruined by perverse incentives is the holy grail. I don't think it is actually tractable in any "central authority free" system. Don't get me started on blockchains that tether names to the most perverse systems available and call it victory.

Given that this system already uses DNS for namespacing of user identifiers (via instances), it seems like it could use DNS for namespacing of channels too

My personal p2p pet project (not ready yet) just accepts namespace chaos bc it doesn't consider any existing infrastructure reliable or safe. https://github.com/BrendanBenshoof/sneakernet

The real problem is that DNS essentially "outs you" as interacting with a particular user. Literally advertises it to your DNS server. It's a very unsafe name management solution in a privacy centric system.

> which have been a nightmare on mastodon

Why?

I get the impression that every attempt to make block lists ends up getting used to target people an admin of the block list doesn't like. I think the root of it is that the admins consuming the blocklist don't want to have to spend time on moderation and are remote from communities where the blocklist is happening. Also the scope of the blocklist is the instance. Compare that to community internal moderation (e.g. channel mods), where someone close to the community is invested in the health of the community and the scope of the block is the relevant community.

Won't users block people they don't like themselves?

That's also possible, and that's fine.

But it's not good if a blocklist admin adds somebody who, say, said that admin's music taste was bad. Likely none of the people downstream of that blocklist will realize that happened or that their blocklist is being misused.

If you tweet something controversial once and the wrong person sees it, they can automatically tag you as a nazi across half the fediverse

It’s like this on bluesky too

gestures broadly is going to be one of the common answers from anyone trying to ward off spam

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