I'm really leery of the new blocklist sharing feature being proposed as part of Masotdon's Sovereign Tech Agency funding. While I'm excited Mastodon is receiving an STF grant, blocklist abuse has been a recurring issue and I'm not eager to see it codified in the admin interface.

For those that weren't here a few years back, Mastodon has a pretty ugly history with blocklists. They've been repeatedly used to block sex positivity, kink, and LGBTQ+ content. While I agree there are a lot of really bad servers on the Fediverse, I'm nervous that blocklist sharing will lead to the same kinds of censorship we saw a few years back. Plus, and no shade to the people who use it, but the Fediblock hashtag has a lot of posts from people who operate on little to no proof of their claims, or who just want to abuse it.

To be totally honest though, my hangup with blocklists comes from the fact that CubHub still has to deal with being suspended by a lot of servers from a bad blocklist. We were wrongfully flagged because someone didn't bother to check our About page that clearly states we do not allow porn of under-age characters, because stupid people think "cub" automatically means cub porn. ​ It doesn't.

So yeah, I dunno. The other proposals look interesting, and, while I've never been one to think we really need E2EE on private messages and who thought it'd just introduce a lot of friction for users, I'm not opposed to it if they can get the UX of it working well.

#Mastodon #MastodonMeta #MastoMeta #Blocklist