robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@griffinkate For reference, the case seems to be https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15766079/norris-v-goldner/

@grrrr_shark @wjmaggos I think there are some minimal expectations that we rely on, though. For instance (I'm not really sure if this is not the only one though), respecting someone's decision not to engage in conversation (i.e. not trying to circumvent it).

@ariadne Answering own question: https://www.zigg.com/2018/natalie-nguyen.html

@ariadne Who is Natalie Nguyen? A quick Google search yields a French TV presenter, a history professor, and a few other people that I don't think treehouse.systems is referring to.

@aral If we're talking about possible features, I'd rather have a concept of wait time for account creation that increases when population grows (with some threshold). That way one could start filtering by steadiness of resolve when the instance gets nearly-too-large.

@delroth It's kinda on purpose, I think?

On one hand, if you accepted numbers from other instances and summed them up:
a) anyinstance could inflate any number sky-high (so _some_ instance somewhere would probably be doing such things to troll, because that doesn't seem subjectively as spammy as posts),
b) you'd need to somehow synchronize things; activitypub is already bad at synchronizing whether X follows Y between their homeservers, so this would be in practice perpetually slightly borked (that said, boosts _are_ propagated to the original instance, so propagating count changes in the other direction would in principle work).

On the other hand, this seems to be "societal engineering by lack of feature", similar to the claimed reason behind lack of quote replies in vanilla mastodon.

@freemo Indeed, you were right. Thanks. @pganssle @aut@sideslip.social @nova

@freemo But also the source server won't send the contents to you, so you won't get it automatically in your timeline by any means, right? @pganssle @aut@sideslip.social @nova

@gynvael Do you have an example corrupted jpeg you'd be willing to post?

@timorl re your thinking of setting up a single-user instance (also, am testing what happens when you reply to a boost, as opposed to the boosted post)

@delroth While experimenting with self-hosting be aware that the state machine for following has no support for reconciliation (so if you mess up the state on your side, it might stay inconsistent forever without anyone noticing).

@emptywheel Scott Alexander claims that NYT's reading of their own style guide varies (esp. in questions of that shape) wildly between different parts of NYT.

(Source: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive, grep for "no fewer than four".)

@freemo The reason for confusion might be that if instance X blocks _your instance_, then you can still see boosts of content from instance X (as long as the booster is on an instance that doesn't block yours/isn't blocked by yours), as opposed to when the block is in the opposite direction. @pganssle @aut@sideslip.social @nova

@aredridel

IOW imagine a magical world where you can have the whole shebang without instances. In that world the point of instances would be purely to create communities and it would be natural and expected to be part of multiple instances. It would also be useful to be able to assert that it's the same user posting "on"/"at"/... all those instances they're a part of. (Do you think that last thing wouldn't be useful?)

Now, in our world, where instances also serve the function of identity management everyone has a single instance that can speak for them, so e.g. federation policies of that instance and about that instance affect whom they can speak to. In the ideal world above, a single non-blocked instance someone's a member of would suffice.

Now, you can obviously do something similar by having multiple fediverse accounts (and cross-linking them via posts), but there's no infrastructure for e.g. enabling others to easily follow this group of identities.

Now that I've written this down, I wonder if we shouldn't try to create support for such "cloud of accounts", so that one can (a) follow such a cloud (b) manage such a cloud for oneself.

@notspookypip

@aredridel
Making instances providers of identity makes it harder to move between them and to be recognized as the same identity that's posting on multiple instances. This also makes your current instance's admin into gatekeepers of moving away from their instance (in particular, if they've blocked some other instance, that instance would normally never learn of the move and wouldn't start the whole following-update dance).

@notspookypip

@aredridel
Yes, they're identity providers, moderation deciders, and more. It would be nicer if at least identity provider role was split from everything else.

@notspookypip