#dev 2025-11-24

2025-11-24 UTC
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[artlung] New infrastructure map dropped. https://bsky.app/profile/malwaretech.com/post/3m63ummsepk2t
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IWDiscord <s​olarshin>
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IWDiscord <s​olarshin>
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IWDiscord <s​olarshin>
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capjamesg https://sinja.io/blog/web-typography-quick-guide looks like a good summary of various browser typography features.
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capjamesg [edit] https://sinja.io/blog/web-typography-quick-guide looks like a good summary of various browser typography features.
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[snarfed] thinking about https://indieweb.org/block a bit. right now, blocking on the indieweb is largely internal to your own site, ie you just stop accepting their interactions. is there any reason to also send them a block (eg webmention) to notify them?
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[snarfed] other protocols do, eg ActivityPub, but it maybe makes more sense there when instance admins are separate from their users
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[tantek] Hah. Almost certainly not.
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[snarfed] indieweb sites usually don't have that distinction
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[snarfed] yeah I get the downside of notifying someone objectionable that you're blocking them
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[snarfed] just curious
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[tantek] There are also solo Mastos which makes AP kinda awkward in that way
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[snarfed] yup
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[tantek] There are actual physical safety concerns depending on the person being blocked
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[tantek] Blocks at a protocol level may be a mistake tbh because the info is leaky (eg sites being compromised)
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[tantek] Similarly with muting
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[snarfed] sure, but the conclusion then is just to never do anything that you're not ok with being fully public, which is a bit of a race to the bottom
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[snarfed] but reasonable for some people. just depends on your risk tolerance
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[snarfed] the usual distinction that the other person can detect the block, but they can't detect a mute, is a decent combination of abilities
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[artlung] Absent some mechanism to create a subset of possible viewers posts are either full public or private and gated by some mechanism. Can webmentions be scoped to a private space?
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[snarfed] [artlung] hah yes, lots of historical work (and skeletons) there. https://indieweb.org/private_posts
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[snarfed] depending on your req'ts, http://indieweb.org/unlisted + https://indieweb.org/unguessable_URL seem to be a sweet spot of low effort to useful end result, ie similar to real access controlled private posts with way way less work
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[tantek] [snarfed] rather than worrying about a hypothetical "race to the bottom", I'd prefer we focus on the use-cases of (especially more vulnerable) people who have actually experienced harm that originated in social media, sometimes involving blocking and escalations in response to
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[tantek] Anything we can do in our design of protocols to reduce, mitigate, or even slow down those harms is worth it
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[tantek] This isn't public vs private, it's more like security threat mitigation
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[tantek] Perfect being the enemy of the good etc
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[snarfed] absolutely! agreed. I think there's a meaningful difference between other networks, where most people are users on someone else's server, so blocking on-protocol can actually be useful, vs indieweb where everyone runs their own site, at least at a high level, so sending a block would always be peer to peer and less useful
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[snarfed] ie, seeing on https://indieweb.org/block that most of our work has been internal to people's sites, and off-protocol, that makes sense
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aaronpk i don't think multi-user is the distinction here either
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[snarfed] it may be if you're considering whether to *send* a block. if you're only sending it directly to the person you're blocking, that's maybe more harm than good. if you're sending it to the admin of a site that they're a user on, you may have a bit more confidence that that admin will actually do something useful with it, or at least not retaliate against you
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[snarfed] like blocking and reporting on closed social networks
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[tantek] I kinda disagree [snarfed] re: admins behavior. I would expect/suspect that admins may share this kind of info with their users, like hey heads up someone blocked you, did you do anything sketch? Who? Oh this person. Etc
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[tantek] Especially on the long tail of smaller Masto instances
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[tantek] I would set expectations that any Masto block you send has a nontrivial likelihood of being shared with the user being blocked, even if on a side channel like a dm or chat
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[snarfed] maybe! it's definitely possible
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[snarfed] more likely on small instances than on medium or big ones, but yes
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[snarfed] I was thinking maybe a bit more about, would the blockee's server actually honor and implement the block, even if the admins also tell the blockee
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[snarfed] (this is true for fediverse servers in general, admins would usually have to fork them and modify their code to change that)
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[snarfed] regardless, blocking absolutely has real risks that we need to work through, I very much agree
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[snarfed] (in general blockees probably more often discover the block when they try to look at the blocker's profile and it _says_ they're blocked, than from admins proactively tell them)
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[tantek] There's certainly a lot of room for UX improvement to increase blocking safety too
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