D. Olifant

If you're looking for a good place to flag advisories not just on domains but also on actors themselves, check out https://pelago.1sland.social

Once you log in with your fediverse handle (the credentials never leave your web browser) you can start reporting domains and actors, flagging them with labels if you want and even uploading screenshots and other documents here:

https://pelago.1sland.social/reports

This will populate a completely transparent feed. You can follow @pelago for announcements about updates to the community reports.

Community moderators have the ability to escalate advisories to recommendations (or retract frivolous advisories, perhaps), with the entire feed visible in FIRES.

Those who receive an advisory are welcome to also log in, contest the advisory or report, and provide counter evidence of their own (to the moderators, we aren't having troll wars in public here).

And if you want to use Pelago to set up your own FIRES server and create your own advisories for your own moderation network, you certainly can.

Feel free to log in, kick the tires, and let me know if you experience any issues.

You can find out more about FIRES, which is a protocol designed for composeable moderation on the Fediverse, an evolution beyond blocklists.

There was every attempt made to codify and set ethical boundaries in the software for this purpose.

More about that, here.

If you just want to browse or consume the FIRES datasets directly, that's at https://fires.1sland.social.

#Fediblock #FediblockMeta #Pelago #Moderation

Apr 5 at 4:06pmWeb
Show threadD. Olifant3d ago
If you'd like to be a community moderator or have any questions, please let me know.
Show threadD. Olifant2d ago

Already found a few bugs. No software survives contact with production.

Fixing them as I see the exception log, though.

Show threadMudMob3h ago

Hey, @oli thank you for this project!

We definitely
- need better moderation tools
- the core Mastodon dev team seems not to have this as a priority
- there were several attempts coming from the community but unfortunately not with overwhelming success and also with a lot of conflict (for different reasons, of course...).

Your proposal of a community-sourced blocklist like https://pelago.1sland.social/ can be a good solution to produce a safer fediverse while avoiding weird power dynamics and fedidrama. Learning from past conflicts, it is key to have a good communication among us, goodwill and the inclusion the perspectives of the people that are commonly targeted by bigotry. Simultaneously we also need a willingness to manage conflicts in a constructive way, and to balance impulses of allyship gone rouge (to call it somehow).

So, thank you very much!

I think will need some time to understand really how this works.

EDIT: lol, now I took a dive and have already several comments:

To support the project, now it would make sense to
a) upload reports of bad actors.
I would focus more on instances, although reporting individuals can make sense when one wants to retain federation with an instance, despite the mods of the other instance having less strict moderation guidelines (mastodon.social, I am looking at you🧐). Still, in many cases the calls for fediblocks on individuals seem a bit overkill and not very efficient for regarding the invested time for mods).

b) we should engage on https://pelago.1sland.social/report/feed with the published reports by up/downvoting. This converts the reports in "community-sourced"

But I have also some questions:

1. who will be the "community moderators"?

2. in https://pelago.1sland.social/report/feed, "Recommendation: drop" means "defederation/suspension", I suppose?

3. I understand that It is not intended that we upload/dump our whole instance blocklist of "moderated servers", isn't it?
(I think this is worth a whole discussion, because on the one side, this saves a lot of work, but it makes also sense to have the manual reporting of instances as a filter function to revise defederations, especially the not clearcut nazi/csam cases)

4. Is it already possible on https://pelago.1sland.social/report/feed to filter out the "individual reports" to be able to focus just on the instances?

5. I don't understand very well what the entries in https://pelago.1sland.social/report/feed are exactly. Some are from the IFTAS or other uploaded blocklists, some are "true" reports made mainly by cathode.church, if I am correct. Is it possible to see/filter already in the table for reports?

6. Where are the up/downvotes of reports visible?

7. The voting system is not entirely clear. Are we voting for the quality of the report, or voting for the instance? (the good/bad confuses me). Also, when do I vote "bad" and when "blocked"??

I voted on some of the instance pages (gave some "bad" for some of the notorious rightwing-instances), but I don't see where this would have any effect.

8. As a feedback: I think the two most important subpages would be the "instances list" and the "reports feed", but they are not very intuitive to find.

haha, sorry, that was more than I intended to ask/comment.

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Show threadD. Olifant3h ago

@Mud Appreciate the feedback! I'm at work, but just a few answers first, before I do a more in depth response:

First off, the existing list was just preloading the IFTAS DNI list. Presumably most people agree on that one, and I didn't want to start with no recommendations, in case people wanted to use it as a list of updates.

I figured once we get Community Admins onboard, they can review those recs and change them if they want, but I wanted some existing reports in place so no one felt weird about making the first report.

You can upvote (or downvote) community reports themselves on the evidence page for the ban itself.

The idea is you upvote or downvote individual reports (or a person accused can 'Contest' individual reports), but each of those reports contributes to a single Advisory or recommendation.

FIRES, the protocol, supports actor level as well as domain-level blocks. I think for a lot of people, especially chasing a bunch of spam accounts across servers that need to be grouped into a single group, this will be very useful.

That said, you can get 'regular blocklists' out of these if you want. You need to hit the dataset page for it in FIRES:

https://fires.1sland.social/datasets/community-reports

^ That page has all of the blocks at the bottom of the page in downloadable form, and the 'recommendation: filter' on accounts become an account mutes file you can download, and recommendation: drop/reject becomes an account blocks file you can download.

  • Who will be 'community moderators'? For starters, anyone interested who isn't from a commonly-blocked server. You don't even need to be a moderator or instance owner on a server to be a community moderator. You just have to have an interest and willingness to review submitted reports and choose whether to 'retract' them or convert them into recommendations.  I figured I'd let the community report for a while, and I'd approve the reports that seem reasonable, but this really shouldn't be up to me. So as soon as there are two or three other community admins, I plan to step back from that role.

  • Yeah drop/reject is basically similar to suspend. Drop is the closest to how suspend works right now. You don't get a reject back like "you are definitely blocked" you get a 200 response and the server just ignores you. There's a lot of filters that distinguish between 'ignore-replies' and 'reject-replies' for instance.

  • Good/Bad/Bookmarked/Blocked -- That's for you! No one else sees that but you. Ever. The closest we might ever get is showing an upvote counter for instances, to give you an idea of what instances are recommended by the community, and 'block' would be used to say, 'I block or would block this instance' and you can mark whatever options work for you, because they'll all be shown on the /you page.  It's designed so that you have, for yourself, your own personal list. We'll (soon) let you export all of that.

  • It isn't yet, but I can look into that.

  • All pre-existing domain data (and associated tags) came from the IFTAS DNI list.

  • On the /report/evidence page (click the link on the community feed to take you to it.)

    • The 'bad' instances you marked, check the /you page. You should see them there. But again, that's just for you. :)

    I'll review some of this and see what I can do. :)

    Some of this might be answered at https://pelago.1sland.social/report/ethics

    FIRES - Dataset: Community Reports

    FIRES: Fediverse Intelligence Replication Endpoint Server

    Show threadkat3d ago

    @oli @pelago

    Gives a 500 error

    Show threadD. Olifant3d ago
    @kat @pelago Thanks for letting me know. It should be fixed now, I hope.
    Show threadkat3d ago

    @oli @pelago

    Gets a 404 error now

    Show threadD. Olifant3d ago

    @kat We're moving through the errors. Sorry, new software.

    What page are you trying to hit that gives the 404?

    Show threadkat2d ago
    @oli Hiya, it was the login page. But all works now.
    Thankyou
    Show threadCho3d ago

    @oli

    Can this be used to ostracize a person with alleged antisemitism by a Welsh settler in South Africa who just hates trans people? Asking for a friend....

    @pelago

    Show threadD. Olifant3d ago
    @chojzina @pelago You can report individuals, not just domains.