54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
# federation
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In regards to [ActivityPub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) (AP),
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a big problem is a lack of clarity on what instances are blocked and why by various instances.
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This is a documentation and accessibility issue as I doubt most instances create or publish either.
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Much like users picking an instance to join because of a theme or the moderation policies, instances could join a federation because of a grand moderation policy.
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The governance of federation is a bit outside of the scope of AP.
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A fork of AP isn't necessary as a system of trust notaries could overlay any federating protocol.
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An ActivityPub instance in a federated network is referred to as a (node) below.
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# decentralized authority
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The other big problem is having central authorities like Google or Apple as moderation.
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You can see a similar problem on the internet with certificate authorities.
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If a CA is compromised, which they have and they will, then the trust is broken at the root and anything that inherited that trust needs to have it reestablished.
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I’m not eager to apply blockchain to something that is a governance issue.
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An alternative is trust notaries.
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# proxy consensus
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The general idea is trusting more than one authority, polling them for a consensus on which nodes are filtered/restricted. Many nodes would simply proxy their inherited filters but can change what node they would inherit trust from.
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Whitelisting may not be necessary.
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What's the most a harassing node can do to a large node before it's blocked?
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The manual process for communicating blocked nodes to other nodes.
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A node should be able to subscribe to a larger node for their filters.
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With multiple subscriptions a node could look for a consensus among trust notaries.
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# activity pub references
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[domain-blocks](https://source.joinmastodon.org/mastodon/docs/blob/master/content/en/api/rest/domain-blocks.md)
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As far as I know, `domain-blocks` is as far as mastodon has gotten for inter-nodal moderation.
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I remember seeing a list posted by [@Gargron](https://mastodon.social/@Gargron) of domains that had media restrictions placed on them but I can't find any mention of this in mastodon's documentation.
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# design inspiration
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- [SSL And The Future Of Authenticity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N4sb-SEpcg)
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- [Convergence Notaries](https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence/wiki/Notaries)
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# issues to watch
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- [ ] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/11129
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- [ ] https://github.com/florence-social/mastodon-fork/issues/108
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- [ ] https://github.com/florence-social/mastodon-fork/issues/110
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- [ ] https://github.com/glitch-soc/mastodon/issues/1135
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# similar projects to evaluate
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- [ ] https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain
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