I'm at the point where I suspect someone following me with a freshly created generic female profile, 0 posts, 120 follows, 2 followers and a 45 in the username as being a maga troll/bot trying to build some legitimacy. (I do know 45 as a dogwhistle for the 45th president of the US)

Need a #fedicheck here... Am I suspecting too much? Or should I just block and report any little dogwhistle? I mean, I'd rather avoid reporting fresh legitimate fedi users...

holy shit wtf @iftas @jaz

#IFTAS #FediCheck is disabled on pagan plus effective immediately. These domains should NEVER be removed from a block list, automated tooling gone awry

Good news! We are now implementing the @iftas CARIAD 66% block list via IFTAS' FediCheck service.

This blocklist combines:

- The IFTAS *Do Not Interact* list, a list of instances that IFTAS highly recommends not to federate with
- A curated list of further domains that a selection high volume instances have defederated from.

There are 80%, 66% and 51% consensus levels available for the curated list. At this point we are syncing with the 66% consensus level.

At the moment we believe 66% is probably the right starting point, though if there's demonstratable value in reducing to 51% we'd consider doing so.

While the FediCheck service will simplify automated blocking of widely recognised offenders, it does not replace our own autonomous blocks based on what we observe and what is reported to us.

I believe the FediCheck service also allows our instance to automatically temporarily limit instances where we're seeing a spam wave or similar, but I need to look into it.

IFTAS have some really good resources, so some further reading if you're interested:

https://connect.iftas.org/library/iftas-documentation/cariad-policy/

https://connect.iftas.org/library/iftas-documentation/iftas-dni-list/

https://connect.iftas.org/library/iftas-documentation/fedicheck/

#MastoAdmin #FediAdmin #FediCheck #IFTAS #SafetyOnline

One of the interesting items that came out of this year's FediForum was a speed demo by @[email protected] for IFTAS FediCheck, an upcoming service that will allow Mastodon server administrators to subscribe to specific one or more CARIADs — Consensus Aggregated Retractable IFTAS Allowlist Denylist — and have them automatically maintained by FediCheck.

This sort of work is hugely important for Trust & Safety. At a local level, the work required to ensure T&S scales linearly with your community size. This goes out the window when you factor in the ability to network with separate instances each with their own culture, community, etc. — suddenly, a small intimate forum with a single admin could become inundated with inappropriate content from outside of the local instance.

Being in-development, IFTAS FediCheck is Mastodon-only, but there are huge benefits to the broader fediverse network of applications, NodeBB included.

We could lobby (likely unsuccessfully) for IFTAS to support NodeBB, but it would definitely be better overall if IFTAS supported an API that we could build plugins/libraries against.

For more information about IFTAS: @[email protected]