Hello everyone
Since the announcement of threads to join the fediverse and the resulting discussions I have been thinking about the matter of content distribution and filtering in the fedi. Here is a possible solution to it.
In essence, one can distinguish between server-based and user-based content filtering.
server-based content filteringregulates which instances federate with each other and which content is cached on the own instance.user-based content filteringregulates what content the end user sees.
Content can also be categorized, for example, according to its origin. Sorted according to the quantity produced, there would be:
- instances
- communities/tags
- users/channels
From this I then derive the following behaviour:
server based content filteringshould be used when servers want to prevent certain content from being cached or when they want to set up a small exclusive gated community with a few selected federated instances.user-based content filteringshould allow granular filtering of all the above content groups with the help of white and blacklists. This could look something like this:
| instances | communities | users | |
|---|---|---|---|
| blacklisted | |||
| whitelisted |
Each field could contain a drag and drop function or a field for importing a blocklist as well as a search function to find instances/communities/users. Instances could also define in advance which default settings an account created with them could come configured with. The instances defederated by the server could optionally be displayed with a checkbox, but then in a grayed out look to make it clear that they cannot be changed by the user.
What do you think?
The problem is A) we are all small servers and will be overwhelmed by large instances B) threads, meta, Microsoft(or whoever) have a goal that is contrary to “surfing, meeting up and sharing”, its literally exclusively to make money out of it all (cue predatory algorithms). Their sole interest is making money. Only that does interest them. They don’t care about anything else, even if they have to pretend to “Love the Fediverse 💖💜💙” or “let’s try 😘 if you don’t like it just stop❤️❤️❤️!”, we love LGBT too “🥳🎉❤️💛💚💙💜” or whatever.
If you don’t see how they are going to do it, worry not, they have tens of thousands of paid people who’s sole interest/obligation/job is monetising.
It won’t be enough but block that shit right now or we’ll be in a worse situation.
You realize that there are bad actors everywhere. I won’t fear any corpo or government just because they are big or because they might change my environment. It is impossible to take down a decentralized network like the fediverse even if there are only 1000 people left using it. We can always adapt as we already did so many times and I can shape my environment the way I want it too. Who says that we have to be victims? Lets empower the users to make their own decisions.
I like your energy and enthusiasm, and I share it quite much (I have my Lemmy server and all 😁🥳), but not fearing big govt or corpos, say if you can opt out going living in Russia or NK then you’d probably do it, it seems like a no brainer.
As you hint at, we might have to fight crap and stuff, and blocking Facebook is a good preventive defence IMO.