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Comment on Has anyone defederated your instance? An update to the Defederation Investigator

Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I’m sorry could you please elaborate on why the rest of the Fediverse would be enraged, or how this could be used for harassment? I don’t think I follow. I’ll admit, I only interact with the Fediverse through Lemmy so maybe there’s some dynamics of the Masto-sphere I’m not picking up.

My understanding is that Mastodon admins can choose to hide their /domain_blocks endpoint to either outside users or even to all non admins. (source), and as a matter of fact almost a thousand of the 1700 Mastodon instances I’m querying already do so, so really I can only get the federation status of the few hundred that remain.

I think the admins that prefer not to show their defeds, in fear of harassment, are already hiding them, so it should be ok for me to query the remaining ones.

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gabe@literature.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There are aspects of the wider fediverse culture that is ignored on lemmy, and thankfully its lack of interoperability has helped it avoid trouble (for now). I’m really not sure how to explain to you how it could be used for harassment as it requires a bit of detailed background to how the wider fediverse functions and its history and I don’t really know if it would convince you if I did explain it in enough detail. Just because data is publicly scrape-able doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to do so.

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- Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well of course I can’t guarantee that I would be convinced, even after hearing that but explanation aside
  
  Just because data is publicly scrape-able doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to do so.
  
  Isn’t it? If, an instance admin, has the possibility of hiding some data to the public and refuses to do so, it’s either:
  
  Because they are fine with the public accessing it
  
  Because they are ignorant and unaware of such a feature, which I honestly don’t think is an acceptable excuse (after all users have entrusted this person with their data, ffs)
  
  At the end of the day what I am doing is nothing more than what any user could do by checking the “Moderated servers” section of the about page of any Mastodon instance.
  
  I’m sorry but I’m really am not seeing the logic behind your point.
  
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  - gabe@literature.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Do you know what kiwifarms is? Just curious.
    
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    Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I didn’t, up until yesterday night when you mentioned it. Had a quick Google search and read the wikipedia page, holy fuck there’s some sick people out there. But I still fail to see how defed.xyz could help them doxx or otherwise harass people.
    
    I don’t to be the author of software used for harassment, obviously, but I don’t think you could use my tool for that, even if you wanted to.
    
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