> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
I run a medium sized Mastodon server. I blocked them because one of their users called me the n-word, I reported them to their admin, and nothing happened. It had zero to do with fediblock or any other communal mechanism. Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
>Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
That's been my observation. "Freedom to... say what exactly?"
I'm A-OK with people saying constructive, civil things I disagree with. I might reply with my disagreement but that's OK. We're talking! I have zero patience with someone jumping in with trolling, harassment, or other abuse.
>The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
and link to a list of all instances who have blocked them for any reason whatsoever. My instance is on that list, as though I blocked them because of fediblock. In reality, it’s impossible for them to know why someone blocked them without doing a survey or something.
Maybe, but they’re still linking to my server (and a bunch of others) as evidence that they’re widely blocked due to fediblock, and not because of individual servers blocking them for bad behavior. I personally couldn’t care less what fediblock said about them. It was nothing whatsoever to do with why I blocked them.
>as evidence that they’re widely blocked due to fediblock
It seems like you're laser-focused on the fact that they link to fediblock instead of the actual words of the sentence.
Their complaint is not about being blocked, they make that clear in the part of the sentence you decided not to quote. They apparently just don't want the reason in the "Reason" column to be a lie.
It's probably a good bet to just read the whole sentence they wrote.
"I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it [...] but I would prefer if they did not lie about their reasons or about me personally."
They (seemingly) just don't want pedos thinking it's okay to post on there. Which is a good thing. So, if you're filling out a reason, just put "massive assholes" or whatever instead something untruthful.
If you can’t shun someone for their direct misbehavior, then why can you decide not to mute someone?
Note that I never told you that you’re not allowed to talk to them. I just said they’re not allowed to harass me or my users anymore. You can still hang out with them all you like.
I was unable to settle on the Fediverse as i did not find an instance from where i could follow and interact with all the people that i know. My social circles are rather "diverse" and people like you are apparently working hard to not allow that.
I guess your users were okay with you setting blocks?
Yes and no. I’m working hard to keep people who act horribly out of my corner of the fediverse. I’ve never blocked someone for having different political opinions from my own, for example, but I’ve blocked plenty of people, even those who mostly share my opinions, because they were behaving like jerks. I’m doing nothing whatsoever to keep you from talking to them.
Hang out with anyone you want to, and I’ll do the same. And yes, my users are specifically OK with it. Our moderation actions are public, we put them to a vote when there’s some question about the right thing to do, and I’ve blogged a lot about the details of it all. Users tend to join and stay with my instance because they agree with my moderation actions, not in spite of them.
"behaving like a jerk" by your cultural norms and standards. I understand your position and wish you and your instance a future of diverse and fruitful conversations.
Well, of course we’re not going to block them due to anyone else’s standards.
Thanks! We’ve been online for 8 years and it’s been a lot of fun, other than dealing with moderation of bad actors. Like the one above who called me an n-word, for instance. Although that was one of the easier mod decisions we had to make, to be sure!
There is zero real world scenarios where someone who is communicating in English in the modern day, call someone an n-word and does not mean for it to be offensive.
You mean, you personally weren’t the target of an insult and you apparently are mystified as to why any other people’s feelings are taken into consideration
Nazi and KKK consider it proper valid word, the only one that actually expresses who and what they have in mind. Their goal is not directly to offend, just to express how they feel about some people.
As far as they are concerned, the worst offense against propriety you can do is to ... call them racists. That is totally always unfair.
Diverse conversations are actually pretty rare in reality when conflicting opinions exist. The paradox of tolerance pretty much demands you weed out the extremists or they will be all that's left.
The trick is not being an ass towards someone you disagree with. If you quote Popper on this, you failed that and are rationalizing your behavior because you know its not good.
The trick is the other person doing that too. Simply put a lot, if not most people don't want a rational debate where they discuss the many sides of an issue. They want to win.
Take religion for example, seemingly most people that have one tend to believe not only they are right about it (if you debate it's correctness it shows your lack of faith), they are trying to convert you and if they fail you are an enemy.
Nah, this approach is not good because it kinda starts with the frontiers already drawn.
You don't even need to assert your own position, just ask question like "What is your intent behind saying that" or "Why does it have to be this specific way?" to derail them into some status quo. Provoke them into explaining their "great plan" until they tumble.
Can you think of a forum that isn't tiny that does not do this kind of moderation that isn't a cesspool? Your theory seems sound, but I don't know if I have ever seen it implemented such that the theory is correct.
I agree. HN has a strong moderation policy against trolling and other awful behavior. Forums that aren’t as moderated as HN don’t tend to last as long, or at least don’t tend to maintain this level of civil communication.
Do you believe that people can hold a negative opinion of someone else and choose not to interact with them, or does your world view require that people are compelled to interact with anyone who demands it of them?
Caveat, I haven’t used mastodon or the fed inverse and might be off on the details.
Isn’t that how the fediverse works? You sign up for an instance based on if you like how they admin it, and if you don’t, you join a different instance?
I’m failing to see how that is a problem for users if they aren’t compelled to stay
That’s exactly correct. It’s a marketplace of policies. If someone thinks I allow too much trash through, they’ll go to another server. If someone thinks I block too much, they’ll go to another server. There are thousands to choose from, each with its own local culture.
People who’ve been on my server for many years implicitly mostly agree with my actions. If they didn’t, they’d have migrated.
Yes, but the different instance has a different set of blocks (both outgoing and ingoing), so the problem kinda persists even when you change instances. You can't have both A and B people in your feed when they (actually their admins) instance-block each other on sight.
Doesn't this mean you can just go to an instance that has mutual open communication with both other instances and then have access to both feeds? This is what happens IRL when I have two friend groups that don't engage, I engage with them both as a separate person.
I hear variations of that logic so often and it’s frustrating. It’s impossible for me to infringe someone’s freedom of speech on the fediverse. Someone can spin up a brand new server right now and start saying whatever they want. I can’t stop them, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. But if I blocked them from my own server, some people are quick to complain about my “censorship”, or whatever.
No. In exercising my freedom of speech to say I don’t want to hear their trash, and I don’t want them harassing my users. Their freedom of speech doesn’t say they have the right to force me to listen to them.
(For people following along at home: the speech I’m talking about here isn’t a debate about appropriate fiscal policy, but about vile escaped-from-4chan trash. I’d never block someone for disagreeing with my politics. I’ll block their ass in a heartbeat for a timeline filled with swastikas and death threats.)
Yea, with his clarification in the other comment it’s clear that this guy is one of those types who probably calls himself a Libertarian while unironically advocating for the removal of people’s right to assembly
You were projecting hard in your last two comments - i generally do not think by constructed group identity. And i'm lost what parts of my wishes you consider authoritarian. I'm just pissed that instance admins install blocks that leave me unable to make my own decisions who i want to interact with - blocking people i like on my behalf.
Typical scenario is that someone gives me their fedi ident and i can't follow them because either my instance blocked theirs or theirs blocked mine.
Ideally i'd have a tool that knows all fedi blocks, where i can specify the people i want to follow and it tells me on what instance i need to register to be able to do that.
Couldn't you just spin up your own instance that only consists of yourself in that case? I'm not being facetious I'm genuinely baffled as I thought this kind of custom plug-and-do-yourself-if-you-dont-like-it is fundamental to how fediverse works and is considered a "perk" of it.
Uh. That would actually solve the problem, but at the cost of having to operate that setup. I saw many people who self-hosted their instance but it seemed rather stressful dealing with some technical aspects, so initially didn't consider it.
I really liked how the story starts with not wanting to introduce captcha because it hurts real users, then continues to spend the next 80% of it covering how open registrations and the public timeline were down for however long, extremely negatively impacting users.
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
Great read. I have a tiny, inconsequential, possibly wrong correction. You had assumed that the “Negative” word on the internal search engine screenshot was sentiment analysis. I think it was instead a button to report the post in the internal system as a “negative” result as in, not actually matching the search they were trying to do. Sentiment analysis doesn’t seem like it would be very useful in this scenario.
I disagree. The icon of "Negative" is of a red human head. Who would choose that icon for "False positive"? IMO it makes more sense as "Negative sentiment"
I agree, fantastic writeup with a nice amount of technical detail sprinkled in. This would work really well as a talk at something like the Chaos Communication Congress.
notice the incorrect conclusion he makes. the fbi emails him asking for info about a user, with a screenshot that includes a threat of violence. FSE guy jumps to the conclusion that it's just innocent braggadocio (despite the fact that another CEO was murdered just 6 months ago). jump to end of article: guy has already committed countless acts of violence (by proxy).
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
I personally think that the fact that violent people exist shouldn't diminish our values regarding privacy and/or anonymity. I don't think you should accommodate messages such as the one WitchKing shared...but I think if you value privacy, your priority should be removing the user and the content, and not appealing to the Feds. Don't make it a safe space for either party, because neither of them are on your side.
You doubt the seriousness of the Witch King of Angmar? The Pale King? The man leads a dark host of fell origin! He wears a ring of Power! His threats are clearly entirely credible, it is only a small step from posting on the Fediverse to a siege of the White City and the deaths of a multitude.
Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
The problem is entirely that you cannot tell a baseless threat from a real one from just the forum post.
Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online threat component!
More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
So no, that screenshot is not "total weaksauce", for law enforcement. Hell, even here, that screenshot was demonstrably from a guy running a criminal enterprise!
That is a completely accurate description of that screenshot IMO. Even if the guy who posted it was making phone calls to get thugs to beat people up and hoping they'd take it further, that post is still clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat. This is "96% of serial killers have used bread" stuff.
>I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever, giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed.
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
The non sequitur was implying that the list was related to why those instances blocked this one, as though everyone blindly followed the fediblock recommendation. I didn’t. I’ve never, not once, taken fediblock’s advice without following up personally to verify their claims.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
As a practical matter, SCOTUS has ruled money is free speech, so why not DDOS.
Why is it legal for me to lobby to have you cut off Medicaid (work requirement), but illegal to DDOS your hospital fundraising, so they don't have enough money to treat you.
Assuming that: the use of money in order to achieve a political outcome is an abuse of power that happens to be legal (I agree to a degree).
The equivalent use of DDOS would be to influence the decision making process in a way that leads to the same outcome. And it would have to be a way of operating that is generally accepted and legal in the first place.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is whether they're aligned with my views. When it's the government making the distinction, the difference is whether they're aligned with the government's views.
Furthermore, a rebellion or freedom fighters in a moral framework is when you have an authoritarian regime, aka “the monster that comes for us all” (Andor S2) that needs to be overcome.
An authoritarian regime has no representation of the population, has no need for feedback, and is ruled by a few. In the work of Thomas Payne he says “When all rights have been taken away, the right of rebellion has been made perfect.”
War. It's called war. In ye olden days, military forces pillaged farms (for food) and sacked cities (for loot). Rarely, there have been short eras of formalized military v military conflicts within various cultures, but this was not the norm. In more modern times, military forces destroys enemy infrastructure to degrade their ability to make war directly target civilians to reduce the # of enemies and hurt morale (supposedly). While sad, one of the facts of life is that war leads to civilian deaths. Usually far more than direct military deaths.
I wish it were so, but the real answer is: because the law doesn't care about your technicalities, they care about what people think/feel, in particular what lawyers and judges think. And lawyers and judges feel that there is a difference between DDOSing a thing offline and politicking your way through the legal system to get a thing taken offline.
The difference is the lawyers and judges do not make any money from the DDOS achieving the same goal. Really, what the law cares about is money. Greed, plain and simple. Yes, what people think/feel factor into this _only_ because when the constituency (read: supporters) are put in an emotionally agitated state, they can be manipulated to believe just about anything, which helps pass things like batshit crazy budget cuts to critical public infrastructure or fuel witch-hunts for imaginary enemies in order to build an enforcement arm.
I know plenty of lawyers that would absolutely disagree with your first sentence, "the law doesn't care about technicalities." Oh, but they do. Technicalities are their tools of exploitation.
> because when the constituency (read: supporters) are put in an emotionally agitated state, they can be manipulated to believe just about anything […]
That’s democracy, at its most basic. Often, it means people with little access to education, but with a lot at stake, casting votes that go against their own interests. And in the U.S., it’s not as if party leadership on either side truly represents them anyway.
The upside, though, is significant: when power shifts, we usually don’t resort to violence. That simple fact - the peaceful transfer of power - provides the stability necessary for society to function and potentially thrive.
Aside from the obvious (it is clearly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, especially given the author's sense of humor) the truth is that the U.S. still has some unsettled business regarding what counts as protected speech. The past few decades have seen a lot of debate and legal back-and-forth regarding what to do with lolicon and shotacon illustrations, which FSE also addresses in another linked post[1]. (Not sure if any other remnants of obscenity law still exist: I'm sure they do, they just don't seem to come up very often online.) In any case, it seems like their fediverse server runs on the idea that if it's legally protected speech it should generally be allowed, or at least not disallowed on the basis that it's gross or something like that. Personally, I can get behind the spirit even if I'm not sure I'm in to go along for the ride. I definitely lean in that general direction. (The counter example would be, well, basically every other fediverse instance. They get pretty long on the rules and instance block lists.)
> The past few decades have seen a lot of debate and legal back-and-forth regarding what to do with lolicon and shotacon illustrations
wild that of all the examples you could choose to bring up, this is the one. not saying the conversation doesn't need to happen, but i think there are a lot more concrete examples that affect many more people that come to mind first.
for GP, there are a lot of other contested ideas around what constitutes free/protected speech in america that aren't related to pedophilia - much of it revolves around political speech, especially with Citizens United (the supreme court case that effectively declared monetary support for political causes to be considered "free speech"). conversely, ground-up economic speech (such as BDS) is often stifled (even calling for boycotts etc under the BDS framework is not considered protected speech in some places).
As far as protected speech as it relates to the Internet and American law though, I don't think I've really seen anything that has been debated quite as much, and not only that, it actually seems to have picked up considerable heat over time rather than quieting down. It first came around (at least in any way that I noticed it) with the Chris Handley case in 2008 and has become a serious point of debate online especially with younger people.
Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO, and I personally don't think people are all that split on it anyways, I think it's just a case where the people and the establishment disagree. BDS I'm simply not familiar with.
It does seem that there are new mounting challenges to free expression right now, but they're relatively new and it's unclear if they will stick around yet.
"Extremist" is just a pejorative variant of "radical". I assume they're using it tongue-in-cheek.
When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.
Aside from the bit about "frontiers", Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is pretty straightforward:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As is the First Amendment to the US Constitution:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I can't speak for Pete. However, given that the expressed position of influential portions of the US government (as well as many of my peers and acquaintances) runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Article 19 and the spirit (if not the letter) of the First Amendment, I consider myself to be a free speech extremist.
Because there are inumerable forms of banned speech. Because freedom of speech is in reality a very narrow construct. See Hustler Magazine v. Falwell 1998.... or just watch the last few scenes of the movie.
You're asking that on a story specifically describing how the FBI is either avoiding or directly violating the constitutional restrictions they are supposed to follow?
I'm sorry, how did the FBI violate anyone's First Amendment rights here? Where in this story did they take down content? Where did they compel speech or silence or association?
LMAO you do not have a first amendment right to not be investigated for making threats in public, even if those threats are baseless! You do not have a right to baselessly threaten people!
The courts have held that the rights in the constitution have limits. Generally, anyone operating outside of the limits would be called an extremist when someone disagrees with them.
A feature of extremists is that they tend to support one cause over all others. They see no room for compromise or balancing of concerns. A breathing extremist may prioritize breathing over eating food and drinking water which are also important for survival.
While, from an immediacy standpoint, breathing is the higher priority, if you prioritize breathing continuously to the exclusion of drinking and eating, you will have problems on the 3-5 day and 8-21 day horizons.
Because the US has very unfree speech, despite what someone wrote on a piece of paper in 17-whatever year.
In general, the US ranks pretty low on most freedom metrics, except for the freedom to kill with a gun. In general, the more your country has to tell you you're free, the less free you actually are.
Many other countries explicitly do not have free speech in their constitution, but something more narrow, like freedom of opinion. In those countries, what rights the constitution says you get, and what rights you actually get, tend to be more closely in alignment.
Freedom of noise might be more descriptive than freedom of speech, in so far as the Western democracies are concerned.
In the US unlimited money has unlimited political power, so free speech, is irrelevant to power distribution, although it might have some academic or personal value for some.
are there any good open-source porn-detector models out there? if i ran an image board in 2025, that would be job #1, since it’s really just a weapon, and we don’t speak or print with our genitals—well, most of us anyway…
fbi contacts a guy who runs a free speech website asks who a particular shitposter is. free-speech guy hates the fbi but complies anyway (as best as he can), later finds out shitposter (who finally got arrested) was an actual commit-violence-against-you terrorist.
> To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface.
You're having cold sweats about a pedophile using your internet service and you call yourself "free speech extremist"? Anyone can and will use and abuse your internet service, that's part of the deal you should have known getting in. Maybe you should stick to flyer delivery. This post is indecipherable, what is the fediverse? I know it's a federated blog / Twitter, and don't care beyond that. What is the FBI doing to it, surveilling it? They surveil public data already. Is there something private in question here?
These CP aren't false flags, people genuinely post CP and share it. It happens to be illegal and hysterical people like you report it the very next second.
What the heck is this? It's hysterical to report cp immediately?
You can be a free speech 'extremist'(clearly a bit tongue-in-cheek) and still want to protect your site from bad actors. Not much free speech to be had when their violations get your site removed.
I agree slightly that the 'meat' in the article was lacking as far as what was actually happening with the FBI. Seems no party would give him an inch tho.
> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
I run a medium sized Mastodon server. I blocked them because one of their users called me the n-word, I reported them to their admin, and nothing happened. It had zero to do with fediblock or any other communal mechanism. Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
>Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
That's been my observation. "Freedom to... say what exactly?"
I'm A-OK with people saying constructive, civil things I disagree with. I might reply with my disagreement but that's OK. We're talking! I have zero patience with someone jumping in with trolling, harassment, or other abuse.
>The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
Yes. They say:
> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
and link to a list of all instances who have blocked them for any reason whatsoever. My instance is on that list, as though I blocked them because of fediblock. In reality, it’s impossible for them to know why someone blocked them without doing a survey or something.
>I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
The rest of the sentence is important to the meaning of the sentence, though...?
"giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed." with a link to a claim that they allow loli.
(For what it is worth, I've blocked them as well, but I still didn't read this paragraph as them "whining about a cabal")
Maybe, but they’re still linking to my server (and a bunch of others) as evidence that they’re widely blocked due to fediblock, and not because of individual servers blocking them for bad behavior. I personally couldn’t care less what fediblock said about them. It was nothing whatsoever to do with why I blocked them.
>as evidence that they’re widely blocked due to fediblock
It seems like you're laser-focused on the fact that they link to fediblock instead of the actual words of the sentence.
Their complaint is not about being blocked, they make that clear in the part of the sentence you decided not to quote. They apparently just don't want the reason in the "Reason" column to be a lie.
It's probably a good bet to just read the whole sentence they wrote.
"I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it [...] but I would prefer if they did not lie about their reasons or about me personally."
They (seemingly) just don't want pedos thinking it's okay to post on there. Which is a good thing. So, if you're filling out a reason, just put "massive assholes" or whatever instead something untruthful.
There is the popular belief that shunning people or groups of people like this will lead to their exclusion from society, not yours.
If you can’t shun someone for their direct misbehavior, then why can you decide not to mute someone?
Note that I never told you that you’re not allowed to talk to them. I just said they’re not allowed to harass me or my users anymore. You can still hang out with them all you like.
I was unable to settle on the Fediverse as i did not find an instance from where i could follow and interact with all the people that i know. My social circles are rather "diverse" and people like you are apparently working hard to not allow that.
I guess your users were okay with you setting blocks?
Yes and no. I’m working hard to keep people who act horribly out of my corner of the fediverse. I’ve never blocked someone for having different political opinions from my own, for example, but I’ve blocked plenty of people, even those who mostly share my opinions, because they were behaving like jerks. I’m doing nothing whatsoever to keep you from talking to them.
Hang out with anyone you want to, and I’ll do the same. And yes, my users are specifically OK with it. Our moderation actions are public, we put them to a vote when there’s some question about the right thing to do, and I’ve blogged a lot about the details of it all. Users tend to join and stay with my instance because they agree with my moderation actions, not in spite of them.
"behaving like a jerk" by your cultural norms and standards. I understand your position and wish you and your instance a future of diverse and fruitful conversations.
Well, of course we’re not going to block them due to anyone else’s standards.
Thanks! We’ve been online for 8 years and it’s been a lot of fun, other than dealing with moderation of bad actors. Like the one above who called me an n-word, for instance. Although that was one of the easier mod decisions we had to make, to be sure!
> "behaving like a jerk" by your cultural norms and standards.
Calling someone the "n-word" doesn't really need a lot of cultural translation to be considered offensive.
Its less a translation thing, but: I do not consider it offensive, yet i have to accommodate these sensitivities while the reverse is not considered.
There is zero real world scenarios where someone who is communicating in English in the modern day, call someone an n-word and does not mean for it to be offensive.
You mean, you personally weren’t the target of an insult and you apparently are mystified as to why any other people’s feelings are taken into consideration
s/there is/i don't know/
Nazi and KKK consider it proper valid word, the only one that actually expresses who and what they have in mind. Their goal is not directly to offend, just to express how they feel about some people.
As far as they are concerned, the worst offense against propriety you can do is to ... call them racists. That is totally always unfair.
Diverse conversations are actually pretty rare in reality when conflicting opinions exist. The paradox of tolerance pretty much demands you weed out the extremists or they will be all that's left.
> Diverse conversations are actually pretty rare in reality when conflicting opinions exist
So are we just not supposed to debate anything ever? Just find a convenient excuse to ban/block/mute and move on?
> The paradox of tolerance pretty much demands you weed out the extremists or they will be all that's left
Too bad everyone has a different idea of who an "extremist" is, and conveniently ignores the ones on their side.
The trick is not being an ass towards someone you disagree with. If you quote Popper on this, you failed that and are rationalizing your behavior because you know its not good.
The trick is the other person doing that too. Simply put a lot, if not most people don't want a rational debate where they discuss the many sides of an issue. They want to win.
Take religion for example, seemingly most people that have one tend to believe not only they are right about it (if you debate it's correctness it shows your lack of faith), they are trying to convert you and if they fail you are an enemy.
Nah, this approach is not good because it kinda starts with the frontiers already drawn.
You don't even need to assert your own position, just ask question like "What is your intent behind saying that" or "Why does it have to be this specific way?" to derail them into some status quo. Provoke them into explaining their "great plan" until they tumble.
Can you think of a forum that isn't tiny that does not do this kind of moderation that isn't a cesspool? Your theory seems sound, but I don't know if I have ever seen it implemented such that the theory is correct.
I believe HN does it pretty well.
I agree. HN has a strong moderation policy against trolling and other awful behavior. Forums that aren’t as moderated as HN don’t tend to last as long, or at least don’t tend to maintain this level of civil communication.
Do you believe that people can hold a negative opinion of someone else and choose not to interact with them, or does your world view require that people are compelled to interact with anyone who demands it of them?
My problem is that the instance admin does the blocking decision for the user, based on their own cultural norms, not the users.
Caveat, I haven’t used mastodon or the fed inverse and might be off on the details.
Isn’t that how the fediverse works? You sign up for an instance based on if you like how they admin it, and if you don’t, you join a different instance?
I’m failing to see how that is a problem for users if they aren’t compelled to stay
That’s exactly correct. It’s a marketplace of policies. If someone thinks I allow too much trash through, they’ll go to another server. If someone thinks I block too much, they’ll go to another server. There are thousands to choose from, each with its own local culture.
People who’ve been on my server for many years implicitly mostly agree with my actions. If they didn’t, they’d have migrated.
Yes, but the different instance has a different set of blocks (both outgoing and ingoing), so the problem kinda persists even when you change instances. You can't have both A and B people in your feed when they (actually their admins) instance-block each other on sight.
What exactly are you advocating for? This sounds entirely like the systems working as intended, it’s just not exactly how you personally would prefer.
You’re using words like you’re pro liberty but the implications of you’re sentences is hyper authoritarian
Forgive me if I am not understanding:
Doesn't this mean you can just go to an instance that has mutual open communication with both other instances and then have access to both feeds? This is what happens IRL when I have two friend groups that don't engage, I engage with them both as a separate person.
> go to an instance that has mutual open communication with both other instances
How do i find these neutral instances? I tried around some but with unsatisfying results.
You make one? I thought spinning up an instance is designed to be easy.
I hear variations of that logic so often and it’s frustrating. It’s impossible for me to infringe someone’s freedom of speech on the fediverse. Someone can spin up a brand new server right now and start saying whatever they want. I can’t stop them, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. But if I blocked them from my own server, some people are quick to complain about my “censorship”, or whatever.
No. In exercising my freedom of speech to say I don’t want to hear their trash, and I don’t want them harassing my users. Their freedom of speech doesn’t say they have the right to force me to listen to them.
(For people following along at home: the speech I’m talking about here isn’t a debate about appropriate fiscal policy, but about vile escaped-from-4chan trash. I’d never block someone for disagreeing with my politics. I’ll block their ass in a heartbeat for a timeline filled with swastikas and death threats.)
Yea, with his clarification in the other comment it’s clear that this guy is one of those types who probably calls himself a Libertarian while unironically advocating for the removal of people’s right to assembly
You were projecting hard in your last two comments - i generally do not think by constructed group identity. And i'm lost what parts of my wishes you consider authoritarian. I'm just pissed that instance admins install blocks that leave me unable to make my own decisions who i want to interact with - blocking people i like on my behalf.
Typical scenario is that someone gives me their fedi ident and i can't follow them because either my instance blocked theirs or theirs blocked mine.
Ideally i'd have a tool that knows all fedi blocks, where i can specify the people i want to follow and it tells me on what instance i need to register to be able to do that.
Couldn't you just spin up your own instance that only consists of yourself in that case? I'm not being facetious I'm genuinely baffled as I thought this kind of custom plug-and-do-yourself-if-you-dont-like-it is fundamental to how fediverse works and is considered a "perk" of it.
Uh. That would actually solve the problem, but at the cost of having to operate that setup. I saw many people who self-hosted their instance but it seemed rather stressful dealing with some technical aspects, so initially didn't consider it.
Currently researching managed fedi hosting...
> That would actually solve the problem, but that the cost of having to operate that setup.
So you expect someone else to incur that cost and not exercise control over how their resources are used, so you can use it for free/low effort?
Valid concern... but my conclusion from that is that the Fediverse is just a bunch of personal lawns you'd better stay away from.
Fediblock was shutdown in September of '23 and this article is full of timestamps on these events showing they happened before the shutdown.
I really liked how the story starts with not wanting to introduce captcha because it hurts real users, then continues to spend the next 80% of it covering how open registrations and the public timeline were down for however long, extremely negatively impacting users.
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
Great read. I have a tiny, inconsequential, possibly wrong correction. You had assumed that the “Negative” word on the internal search engine screenshot was sentiment analysis. I think it was instead a button to report the post in the internal system as a “negative” result as in, not actually matching the search they were trying to do. Sentiment analysis doesn’t seem like it would be very useful in this scenario.
I disagree. The icon of "Negative" is of a red human head. Who would choose that icon for "False positive"? IMO it makes more sense as "Negative sentiment"
There is really quite a lot to like about this post:
1) Gentleman is doing citizen science figuring out a small part of the FBI's intelligence gathering/spying apparatus.
2) Random Fediverse drama tidbits.
3) Interesting sysadmin tactics for small server operators.
4) This torswats fellow sounds like a piece of work and gets arrested which adds an interesting subplot.
5) Seems like quite an intelligent writer, I just like the style.
5 stars. Well worth reading.
I agree, fantastic writeup with a nice amount of technical detail sprinkled in. This would work really well as a talk at something like the Chaos Communication Congress.
notice the incorrect conclusion he makes. the fbi emails him asking for info about a user, with a screenshot that includes a threat of violence. FSE guy jumps to the conclusion that it's just innocent braggadocio (despite the fact that another CEO was murdered just 6 months ago). jump to end of article: guy has already committed countless acts of violence (by proxy).
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
I personally think that the fact that violent people exist shouldn't diminish our values regarding privacy and/or anonymity. I don't think you should accommodate messages such as the one WitchKing shared...but I think if you value privacy, your priority should be removing the user and the content, and not appealing to the Feds. Don't make it a safe space for either party, because neither of them are on your side.
The FSE guy is telling a story from 2023. I'd have reached the same conclusion back then also.
Anyone could be violent, but that screenshot is total weaksauce. Is it even the same guy or just someone random blowing off steam?
You doubt the seriousness of the Witch King of Angmar? The Pale King? The man leads a dark host of fell origin! He wears a ring of Power! His threats are clearly entirely credible, it is only a small step from posting on the Fediverse to a siege of the White City and the deaths of a multitude.
Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
The problem is entirely that you cannot tell a baseless threat from a real one from just the forum post.
Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online threat component!
More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
So no, that screenshot is not "total weaksauce", for law enforcement. Hell, even here, that screenshot was demonstrably from a guy running a criminal enterprise!
this remark about the threat is incredibly presumptuous:
"it was also clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat."
That is a completely accurate description of that screenshot IMO. Even if the guy who posted it was making phone calls to get thugs to beat people up and hoping they'd take it further, that post is still clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat. This is "96% of serial killers have used bread" stuff.
But it was never a joke! It was a guy basically running harassment enterprise, including swatting people and other false flag style crimes.
He wasn't being silly or lampooning anything or creating satire, he was trying to make conversation worse. That's not a joke.
>I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever, giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed.
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
That sounds like a non sequitur to the statement you are replying to. What does blocking or disliking someone have to do with fact checking?
The non sequitur was implying that the list was related to why those instances blocked this one, as though everyone blindly followed the fediblock recommendation. I didn’t. I’ve never, not once, taken fediblock’s advice without following up personally to verify their claims.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
Actually, what does being blocked by half the fediverse has to do with fact checking ? Nothing, but that's the angle the author of this story chose.
No it is not.
> Pedophiles were showing up on FSE.
That seems to be a problem with the Fediverse in general. And admittedly, Discord.
Or really anywhere that you can upload a picture and don't tie your real name to.
That was a lot
As a practical matter, SCOTUS has ruled money is free speech, so why not DDOS.
Why is it legal for me to lobby to have you cut off Medicaid (work requirement), but illegal to DDOS your hospital fundraising, so they don't have enough money to treat you.
Different means but the same outcome... https://www.britannica.com/event/Citizens-United-v-Federal-E...
Your example misses something.
Assuming that: the use of money in order to achieve a political outcome is an abuse of power that happens to be legal (I agree to a degree).
The equivalent use of DDOS would be to influence the decision making process in a way that leads to the same outcome. And it would have to be a way of operating that is generally accepted and legal in the first place.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is whether they're aligned with my views. When it's the government making the distinction, the difference is whether they're aligned with the government's views.
No it's not. The main difference is that terrorists target civilian population as a means to get what they want, and freedom fighters target military.
Furthermore, a rebellion or freedom fighters in a moral framework is when you have an authoritarian regime, aka “the monster that comes for us all” (Andor S2) that needs to be overcome.
An authoritarian regime has no representation of the population, has no need for feedback, and is ruled by a few. In the work of Thomas Payne he says “When all rights have been taken away, the right of rebellion has been made perfect.”
Name me one war that didn't target civilians...
what's it called when military targets civilians to get what they want?
War. It's called war. In ye olden days, military forces pillaged farms (for food) and sacked cities (for loot). Rarely, there have been short eras of formalized military v military conflicts within various cultures, but this was not the norm. In more modern times, military forces destroys enemy infrastructure to degrade their ability to make war directly target civilians to reduce the # of enemies and hurt morale (supposedly). While sad, one of the facts of life is that war leads to civilian deaths. Usually far more than direct military deaths.
>While sad, one of the facts of life is that war leads to civilian deaths. Usually far more than direct military deaths.
Fair play to the Ukrainian forces who are doing a fantastic job of minimising Civilian deaths. Road map for the future[?]
It's a bad analogy. What if the civilians are themselves perpetuating the regime's views without any sort of independent thinking?
It's not an analogy, it's the dictionary definition.
I wish it were so, but the real answer is: because the law doesn't care about your technicalities, they care about what people think/feel, in particular what lawyers and judges think. And lawyers and judges feel that there is a difference between DDOSing a thing offline and politicking your way through the legal system to get a thing taken offline.
The difference is the lawyers and judges do not make any money from the DDOS achieving the same goal. Really, what the law cares about is money. Greed, plain and simple. Yes, what people think/feel factor into this _only_ because when the constituency (read: supporters) are put in an emotionally agitated state, they can be manipulated to believe just about anything, which helps pass things like batshit crazy budget cuts to critical public infrastructure or fuel witch-hunts for imaginary enemies in order to build an enforcement arm.
I know plenty of lawyers that would absolutely disagree with your first sentence, "the law doesn't care about technicalities." Oh, but they do. Technicalities are their tools of exploitation.
> because when the constituency (read: supporters) are put in an emotionally agitated state, they can be manipulated to believe just about anything […]
That’s democracy, at its most basic. Often, it means people with little access to education, but with a lot at stake, casting votes that go against their own interests. And in the U.S., it’s not as if party leadership on either side truly represents them anyway.
The upside, though, is significant: when power shifts, we usually don’t resort to violence. That simple fact - the peaceful transfer of power - provides the stability necessary for society to function and potentially thrive.
FSE {free speech extremists}, why would one have to be an extremist in country where free speech is enshrined in its Constitutional Law.
Aside from the obvious (it is clearly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, especially given the author's sense of humor) the truth is that the U.S. still has some unsettled business regarding what counts as protected speech. The past few decades have seen a lot of debate and legal back-and-forth regarding what to do with lolicon and shotacon illustrations, which FSE also addresses in another linked post[1]. (Not sure if any other remnants of obscenity law still exist: I'm sure they do, they just don't seem to come up very often online.) In any case, it seems like their fediverse server runs on the idea that if it's legally protected speech it should generally be allowed, or at least not disallowed on the basis that it's gross or something like that. Personally, I can get behind the spirit even if I'm not sure I'm in to go along for the ride. I definitely lean in that general direction. (The counter example would be, well, basically every other fediverse instance. They get pretty long on the rules and instance block lists.)
[1]: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/the-loli-question....
> The past few decades have seen a lot of debate and legal back-and-forth regarding what to do with lolicon and shotacon illustrations
wild that of all the examples you could choose to bring up, this is the one. not saying the conversation doesn't need to happen, but i think there are a lot more concrete examples that affect many more people that come to mind first.
for GP, there are a lot of other contested ideas around what constitutes free/protected speech in america that aren't related to pedophilia - much of it revolves around political speech, especially with Citizens United (the supreme court case that effectively declared monetary support for political causes to be considered "free speech"). conversely, ground-up economic speech (such as BDS) is often stifled (even calling for boycotts etc under the BDS framework is not considered protected speech in some places).
As far as protected speech as it relates to the Internet and American law though, I don't think I've really seen anything that has been debated quite as much, and not only that, it actually seems to have picked up considerable heat over time rather than quieting down. It first came around (at least in any way that I noticed it) with the Chris Handley case in 2008 and has become a serious point of debate online especially with younger people.
Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO, and I personally don't think people are all that split on it anyways, I think it's just a case where the people and the establishment disagree. BDS I'm simply not familiar with.
It does seem that there are new mounting challenges to free expression right now, but they're relatively new and it's unclear if they will stick around yet.
"Extremist" is just a pejorative variant of "radical". I assume they're using it tongue-in-cheek.
When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.
Aside from the bit about "frontiers", Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is pretty straightforward:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As is the First Amendment to the US Constitution:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I can't speak for Pete. However, given that the expressed position of influential portions of the US government (as well as many of my peers and acquaintances) runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Article 19 and the spirit (if not the letter) of the First Amendment, I consider myself to be a free speech extremist.
Because there are inumerable forms of banned speech. Because freedom of speech is in reality a very narrow construct. See Hustler Magazine v. Falwell 1998.... or just watch the last few scenes of the movie.
https://youtu.be/gh30mLyNQM0
You're asking that on a story specifically describing how the FBI is either avoiding or directly violating the constitutional restrictions they are supposed to follow?
I'm sorry, how did the FBI violate anyone's First Amendment rights here? Where in this story did they take down content? Where did they compel speech or silence or association?
LMAO you do not have a first amendment right to not be investigated for making threats in public, even if those threats are baseless! You do not have a right to baselessly threaten people!
The courts have held that the rights in the constitution have limits. Generally, anyone operating outside of the limits would be called an extremist when someone disagrees with them.
To elaborate, in the context of the article, the author is not so much of an extremist that they condone certain illegal speech by pedophiles.
A feature of extremists is that they tend to support one cause over all others. They see no room for compromise or balancing of concerns. A breathing extremist may prioritize breathing over eating food and drinking water which are also important for survival.
While, from an immediacy standpoint, breathing is the higher priority, if you prioritize breathing continuously to the exclusion of drinking and eating, you will have problems on the 3-5 day and 8-21 day horizons.
Because the US has very unfree speech, despite what someone wrote on a piece of paper in 17-whatever year.
In general, the US ranks pretty low on most freedom metrics, except for the freedom to kill with a gun. In general, the more your country has to tell you you're free, the less free you actually are.
Many other countries explicitly do not have free speech in their constitution, but something more narrow, like freedom of opinion. In those countries, what rights the constitution says you get, and what rights you actually get, tend to be more closely in alignment.
Could you elaborate how the U.S. doesn’t have free speech?
It’s illegal to call for boycotting Israel in many US states [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
Which countries in your opinion does have free speech?
Freedom of noise might be more descriptive than freedom of speech, in so far as the Western democracies are concerned.
In the US unlimited money has unlimited political power, so free speech, is irrelevant to power distribution, although it might have some academic or personal value for some.
are there any good open-source porn-detector models out there? if i ran an image board in 2025, that would be job #1, since it’s really just a weapon, and we don’t speak or print with our genitals—well, most of us anyway…
sorry to be this person, but can anyone TLDR this for me?
Actually, I think if you set your referrer to boardreader.com and reload the page, the host might serve you a summary
this covers the highlights:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221205
fbi contacts a guy who runs a free speech website asks who a particular shitposter is. free-speech guy hates the fbi but complies anyway (as best as he can), later finds out shitposter (who finally got arrested) was an actual commit-violence-against-you terrorist.
You don't want to traverse that domain, or?
he could always archive.is first
The article technically does have a TLDR in the second paragraph, though not directly labelled.
Third paragraph.
No, the second paragraph contains the TL;DR (summary) being referenced.
The word TLDR appears in the third paragraph, but the summary it refers to is in the second paragraph, starting with the words "To summarize, ..."
https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html#:~...
tldr from 2nd para of article:
> To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface.
That's not the real kicker, though. You at least have to also skip to the end and read the last couple paragraphs.
You're having cold sweats about a pedophile using your internet service and you call yourself "free speech extremist"? Anyone can and will use and abuse your internet service, that's part of the deal you should have known getting in. Maybe you should stick to flyer delivery. This post is indecipherable, what is the fediverse? I know it's a federated blog / Twitter, and don't care beyond that. What is the FBI doing to it, surveilling it? They surveil public data already. Is there something private in question here?
These CP aren't false flags, people genuinely post CP and share it. It happens to be illegal and hysterical people like you report it the very next second.
Can't even use a search engine to Google one word. Pedophiles really aren't the brightest, huh.
What the heck is this? It's hysterical to report cp immediately?
You can be a free speech 'extremist'(clearly a bit tongue-in-cheek) and still want to protect your site from bad actors. Not much free speech to be had when their violations get your site removed.
I agree slightly that the 'meat' in the article was lacking as far as what was actually happening with the FBI. Seems no party would give him an inch tho.
I read it as fsf meets the fbi :D
Glancing too quickly...
"SBF is already in jail tho right... er, oh"
i also was expecting some russian action initially