Derek Powazek 🐐
Mastodon feature request: an automated process that tells instance owners how many people blocked users on their instance, or their instance entirely, per day, with warnings when the rate goes up significantly, and a roundup of the most-blocked people.
Admins need tools to better manage their communities and know who on their servers is ruining it for everyone.
Call it Bad Apple Detection.
Evan Prodromou
@fraying not entirely true. It's true that `Block` activities don't get federated. But sending servers can tell when a user can't fetch things or can't send things, which usually means a block. I don't think Mastodon reports it, though.
Derek Powazek 🐐
Replies from admins indicate that blocks do not federate, which means this idea is impossible for now. Which is a bummer.
Seems to me like mastodon gets a lot of marketing mileage out of talking up federation and how instance admins moderate their communities and then gives those admins very few tools to actually do that. This is a key failure in the fedi framework.
Derek Powazek 🐐
I absolutely know which of my goats would get blocked the most, and of course it's the boys.
Also Juniper. She knows what she did.
Derek Powazek 🐐
Maybe this info already exists?
Masto admins: can you see how often your members are getting blocked? Is there a roundup anywhere?
I don't know because I'm not an admin to anyone but my goats, and that's more of a power-sharing agreement.
Evan Prodromou
@fraying yes, I'm pretty sure.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@evan Heh. I almost invoked you.
So an enterprising fedi app could do what I outlined in my original post?
Evan Prodromou
@fraying sure.
So, we call it out specifically in the ActivityPub spec: people who are in an angry cloud get even angrier when they find out that they have been blocked.
People sometimes take a block as a challenge to continue abusing the blocker, following them across platforms and sometimes into real life.
Which is why we recommend not to federate `Block` activities.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@evan that’s good to know! Thanks!
Evan Prodromou
@fraying I think your idea of surfacing it in aggregate is good.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@evan I see. So what other metrics could be provided to instance admins to monitor the behavior of their users? Or, could blocks be federated anonymously?
Evan Prodromou
@fraying there was a tool around for a while that would check other servers for server blocks against your own server. I think it was developed by harassers affiliated with Kiwi Farms. I think it was considered a grave error to use this tool, partly because of the origin, but maybe also in its intent to evaluate server blocks in order to evade them. I haven't seen it mentioned in a couple of years.
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