this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Blocking and unblocking should be normal, expected, easily discoverable, and openly discussed. There are a lot of people on the Internet; a nonzero number of them are frothing assholes; and frothing assholes are quite capable of running servers.
The whole system we're on here is still new and in rapid flux. Expect change. This isn't Reddit with admins saying for years that hosting /r/jailbait is essential to free speech. It takes time to develop agreeable responses to kinds of trouble this system hasn't yet seen.
SMTP email has been around since 1983. When I was running mail servers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was still plenty of controversy over how to properly block spam & abuse from bad-actor mail servers. IRC has been around since 1988, and the history of IRC is the history of conflicts over federation; going back to the founding of EFNet by the exclusion of
eris.berkeley.eduand any other server that peered with it.That's what the long-term history of a federated service looks like. There is change. There is controversy. There are people goddamn sure that if you don't accept their horse porn, that you must hate free speech.
smh this is just the kind of NSFL content we're talking about
The thread was already tagged :)
hah touchΓ©!
Giant images don't really contribute to discussions. :(
The problem is not that some (or many) communities may block access to some (or many) other communities, but rather that such blocking is not immediately obvious and may give an appearance that those blocked communities don't exist (kind of like lying by omission). This is especially true if the description of your community implies a lack of enforced blocking. If someone manages a community where it's very clear that outside access is moderately to extremely controlled, I completely support that.
The point of blocking is to cause things to be invisible to the default view.
If the blocked material is put in users' face so they know it's blocked, that misses the point of blocking it.
Mod logs and published block lists are a great way of allowing users who are concerned about overblocking to investigate ... without failing at the whole endeavor by sending every user a copy of all the horse porn & Nazi spam that got blocked.
When I ran spam filtering for an institutional email server about 20 years ago, I made the "mod logs" (or rather, SMTP envelope data of blocked messages) available to users; but they had to go to a web page to see what messages had been blocked; and the content was not visible (since the mail server had never accepted it). I wrote that code so that my users could tell me if the spam blocking I'd configured was mistakenly blocking mail they wanted to receive.
(The users were scientists & engineers. They could read email headers. If they wanted to.)
But the point of blocking the horse porn spam and Nazi froth is lost if the users have to see it anyway so they know it's blocked.
Horse porn is not a made-up example, by the way. There was an email spammer named Jeremy Jaynes, who was in the habit of sending spam promoting bestiality porn. When he was arrested, suddenly the users on the email server I was running stopped complaining to me about horse porn.