Post #4076818

2026-07-24 21:50 UTC

Yes! "Island networks" are an important step in that direction. @oli@olifant.social has done a lot of work on this, The Website League is a good real-world, and @Bonfire has just introduced archipelago mode. (Credit where credit is due: @noracodes@tenforward.social introduced the archipelago framing back in 2023 The Fediverse is Already Dead, which should be mandatory reading for everybody here.) @DePemig@social.coop @benpate@mastodon.social @laurenshof@indieweb.social

Replies (1)

@jdp23@neuromatch.social 2026-07-24 22:06

@benpate@mastodon.social Steps to a Safer Fediverse has my thoughts as of early 2024 on how to make progress ... and it's depressing how little has changed since then. I agree with @laurenshof@indieweb.social that "better safety tooling" is a bit of a red herring; the first section of this document is "It's about people, not just the software and protocol". That said improving the tools is useful, and the next section is "It's about the software too" with some specific ideas. In another thread @rakoo@blah.rako.space metioned that consent is a key aspect of a more safety-oriented fediverse. Three specific ways this plays out: allow-list or allow-list-plus federation. This is an area where there's been noticeable progress since 2024, with Island Networks, GoToSocial and Bonfire providing first-class support for allow-list federation, etc. But there's atill a lot more that needs to be done, because nobody's really tacked the question of how new instances can get discovered and federated with in a mostly allow-list network. There's certainly some intriguing thinking on this front, and The free fediverses should focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety has a roundup of some of the ideas, but nobody's put them into practice yet as far as I know. interaction controls. GoToSocial, Bonfire, etc support these; Mastodon doesn't, and while the quote-post implementation is on a path to supporting them they haven't prioritized this. Mastodon and Mastodon-based forks make up so much of today's fedii that without them supporting it, they're only useful for island networks. the lack of a general consent mechanism for new funcationality that requires consent ... this was the problem that Bridgy Fed ran into, and it affects anybody trying to do stuff that's not easily reducible to the existing consent flags. There's a bit of discussion here but as far as I know nobody's written it up in general. @DePemig@social.coop

Open ##4076817