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?
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.