social.noyu.me

the nightmare of the fediverse is that like… someone replied to me, there weren’t obvious red flags on their profile and we had a perfectly pleasant interaction, and on any other platform i’d just go on my merry way… but this is The Fediverse™, so i am just staring at the domain name and software of the instance they’re on and worried that someone will notice social.noyu.me federates with that instance because they replied to or follow me, and then someone will assume i, personally, am Literally Hitler or something and just…

aaaaaaaaaa

this place sucks. fediblock is possibly the worst way of managing social relationships i’ve ever seen. the way everyone acts about it terrifies me.

just wanted to get this off my chest

i do not know how to fucking explain to you all that a server running a twitter clone, a community, and a friendship group are not fucking synonyms

i’m not even complaining about the practice of blocking per se, it’s just the social pressure that’s in the back of my mind is a monster worse than anything twitter discourse has ever produced

voltaire voice i may not agree with what some of the other 2000 users on your instance have to say, but i will not pre-emptively block your entire instance because of it, because i made my own instance exclusively for my own use, because it’s the only way i can avoid going fucking insane while using this godforsaken network

this is a vent thread, not a solutions thread, but if you want to know what alternative i’d prefer: webs of trust. don’t trust an entire community, trust people your friends trust. blocking entire instances would be a last resort in such cases and we could all be a lot more… normal. it’d probably be much more effective at reducing harassment than anything twitter or current instance admins have ever done, too.

@hikari we'd rather go the other way: fully hidden social graphs. opaque federation etc. instances merely as a discovery mechanism, but not the main channel by which the network works.

it's still web of trust fwiw, but the stakes are different.

@SoniEx2 hmm could you elaborate a bit on what you’re imagining? wouldn’t you still have a visible social graph, but between users rather than instances?

@hikari no that's the nice thing about "link keys" and something like i2p.

all interactions happen either between (link key, identity key) or (link key, link key) (for e2ee DMs etc).

you cannot know the link keys. you'll never find (identity key, identity key) pairs being used on the network. not even admins know the link keys (ideally). they're opaque.

@hikari no wait that's not the security property. the security property is that you can't trace back an identity key from just a link key unless you have the matching link key.

admins don't get those, but since we want ACLs, they must know which link keys to accept. they don't and cannot keep track of identity keys tho.

@hikari but basically yeah, nobody gets to see (identity key, identity key) pairs anywhere: instances don't need them for the network to function, if instances don't need them then we simply don't collect them in the first place, so admins cannot get them either. and importantly they don't leak on the DHT either.

sorry we hope this made sense.

@hikari

This sort of thing is part of why I’ve been hesitant to switch to a smaller host for the longest time. Because with smaller hosts, it seems it more likely we’ll get de-federated randomly, or turns out surprise! The admin is one of the fediblock types. And by the time you could hop away, it may actually be just too late for you.

Which, I don’t think is exactly a good thing.