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Something important that @inthehands is talking about here:
It's going beyond blocklists.
There are so many things we can do that aren't blocklists, and certainly aren't consensus blocklists.
Quarantine is such an obvious and simple step and a time honored tradition for tackling these sorts of problems.
As is a keyword embargo: require moderator review before posts with certain keywords make it through from people who aren't being followed, or equivalents thereof.
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112872266316450280
Aside: None of these ideas are especially new:
* Quarantining new interactions was asked for in 2022: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21536
* Reply controls have been asked for since at least 2020: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14762
* Approval-required-by-default was asked for in 2019: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10590
* Disable replies was asked for in 2018: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8565
* Mutuals only has been asked for since at least 2017: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/422
Now that I've slept, a followup on what it would take for ideas like these to happen. A few different ways:
1. Ping mastodon as a project and either implement the feature for them or advocate that they prioritize solving it.
2. Encourage other projects to come up with a strategy and implementation for it.
3. Support developers who are working in these spaces.
4. Demand this feature from your _admins_. Encourage them to do the above three.
5. Don't treat blocklists as the end all, be all.
But breaking outside of the realm of safety features, I'd also like to highlight a few other things
* Despite AP in many ways being a research protocol it is _not well suited_ to experiments in this space. We need to buckle down and do hard work on the protocol, but that means _making tradeoffs that historically have made people on the fediverse very angry_. Help provide space for people doing this work, or help with doing this work yourself
* A lot of projects other than Mastodon need support
@hrefna this is what I'm working towards with FIRES — blocklists are a stop gap, until we had better federation management.
I already have something of a plan for implementing this in Mastodon, but with limited team resources, it wasn't possible to schedule the work on that (back like earlier this year or last year)
The key hurdles are:
- currently separate allow & block tables for domains
- no real "instances" table (it's derived from allows, blocks & accounts)
But I think this is possible
@hrefna I'd be excited to spend time working on these if you know of any efforts to make them happen.
@tacertain Some possibilities!
* Letterbook has an eye toward implementations in this space. They aren't mature enough yet for a lot of them, but that also means it needs people who can get down into the weeds: https://github.com/Letterbook/Letterbook
* @thisismissem has been actively developing in this space, has a great deal of experience here, and has contributed to mastodon, but needs fiscal support in her work.
* @nivenly can be willing to play ball if you have an idea you want to spend time developing.
@hrefna Thanks for the pointers. I didn't have any ideas beyond the obvious ones like the ones you mentioned. But will check out the GitHub project!
Thanks for making sure we saw this Hrefna!
If you're interested in having us / Nivenly take a look Andrew, please send us an email at info[at]nivenly.org 
@hrefna I think "Despite AP in many ways being a research protocol it is _not well suited_ to experiments in this space." is a really insightful point.
Do you think being poor at experiments comes from the protocol format itself, or the culture (and way that software handles experiments) that has built up around it in AP?
@sgf IMO it's a mixture and those two factors feeding into each other.
For instance:
It was built on social web technologies, but no one implements social web technologies, not in a way that works for systems like these at scale, so to experiment in this space first you have to either build the social web technologies or you need to compromise.
Then there's no test suite, so you have no way of knowing what compromises are safe.
Changes, however, are very expensive due to the tech base.
@sgf If it were easy to iterate in a lightweight way some loss of interoperability isn't as much of a concern: I can iterate rapidly until I'm happy with it and then share a pattern for others.
But it takes a significant amount of work to even get to the point where you can iterate at all, and by that point you've usually baked in a lot of path dependencies.
OTOH if it were a bit of a PITA to set up but interop was basically guaranteed, then you could at least iterate with confidence.
@hrefna did you see that GoToSocial has implemented their own interactions controls thing, but have refused to publish a FEP meaning no one else can easily implement the same logic?
(See fedidevs matrix)
https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/federation/posts/#interaction-policy
@thisismissem Ugh, why are they refusing to publish a FEP? Have they given a reason?
@hrefna nope, which is hugely disappointing. I know Daniel from Pixelfed was recently talking about publishing a FEP for his version of this..
But it's going to be really hard to support this if we end up with 5 different ways of doing reply controls.
@thisismissem "I'll take 'Reasons why Hrefna has chilled on AP development for $500,' Alex" -.-
@hrefna like a whole bunch of mess we're in now that the fedi is expanding beyond microblogging is due to mastodon originally doing non-spec things and everyone now needing to sort that out.
I'd hope we'd not see other projects see that as a free pass, but rather as a "let's not do that again"