Today's terrible take about instance federation: "Fediverse should transition to a whitelist-based federation approach". Great, so admins should be in charge of who the hell I'm allowed to interact with - and even if I were to spin up my own instance I'd still have to convince other admins to let me federate with them.

Sorry, but this is where I draw the line: I'm too old for "IRC channel wars 2.0", I had enough with them in 2012, I'm sure as hell not going to deal with them in 2023.

Consider this account effectively frozen until things improve in the Fediverse at large, but I really don't think they will.

Someone is building a "global fediverse post indexer" that:

* scrapes the public APIs so it can't be blocked via defederation
* uses a bunch of dynamic IPs so it can't be banned at network level (hilariously, the author redacted this part and forgot that the edit history can be viewed by anyone)
* can be blocked by server admins via robots.txt, but they're planning to publish which instances are opting out (right now this is "open for debate")
* can be blocked by users by disabling indexing in the profile settings (!) or adding a specific hashtag to their bio (!!)

There's ZERO mention of opt-in, a lot of pushback against anyone who dares calling this thing a scraper ("we're using public APIs, so we're not a scraper") and the inevitable "we got complaints only from people who have something to hide".

With this attitude, I wonder how they're going to respond to the first GDPR compliant they're inevitably going to receive, it'll be fun 🍿

Belated #introduction.

Hello, I'm Matteo. I'm an operations/infrastructure automation engineer for a major Italian financial institution, dad, and proud human servant of a senior ginger cat. During my free time, I usually dabble with retrocomputing, especially emulated DEC and IBM mainframe systems from the '60-'70s.

Many many thanks to @ariadne and the other people behind Treehouse for putting up with the hassle of running a semi-public Mastodon instance.