Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
1) Gentleman is doing citizen science figuring out a small part of the FBI's intelligence gathering/spying apparatus.
2) Random Fediverse drama tidbits.
3) Interesting sysadmin tactics for small server operators.
4) This torswats fellow sounds like a piece of work and gets arrested which adds an interesting subplot.
5) Seems like quite an intelligent writer, I just like the style.
5 stars. Well worth reading.
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
That seems to be a problem with the Fediverse in general. And admittedly, Discord.
IIRC, Tor doesn't have that issue.
Most (all? all the relevant ones, I think) browsers honor the referer-policy[1] header if a referring site sets it. There are options in common site frameworks, like Django[2] to control that for UAs that respect it.
Since most UAs respect it, if the indexing site had wanted to, they could easily have prevented the header from being sent for most users.
[1](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Refere...)
[2](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/ref/middleware/#referr...)
Isn't there a market for anti-DDOS third-party services for API endpoints (Cloudflare etc) — through probably for "Free Speech Extremist" that wouldn't be suitable solution, and there are charges too (though presumably when facing a situation like this you actually save money).
[1]: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/the-loli-question....
wild that of all the examples you could choose to bring up, this is the one. not saying the conversation doesn't need to happen, but i think there are a lot more concrete examples that affect many more people that come to mind first.
for GP, there are a lot of other contested ideas around what constitutes free/protected speech in america that aren't related to pedophilia - much of it revolves around political speech, especially with Citizens United (the supreme court case that effectively declared monetary support for political causes to be considered "free speech"). conversely, ground-up economic speech (such as BDS) is often stifled (even calling for boycotts etc under the BDS framework is not considered protected speech in some places).
When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As is the First Amendment to the US Constitution:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I can't speak for Pete. However, given that the expressed position of influential portions of the US government (as well as many of my peers and acquaintances) runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Article 19 and the spirit (if not the letter) of the First Amendment, I consider myself to be a free speech extremist.
LMAO you do not have a first amendment right to not be investigated for making threats in public, even if those threats are baseless! You do not have a right to baselessly threaten people!
While, from an immediacy standpoint, breathing is the higher priority, if you prioritize breathing continuously to the exclusion of drinking and eating, you will have problems on the 3-5 day and 8-21 day horizons.
In general, the US ranks pretty low on most freedom metrics, except for the freedom to kill with a gun. In general, the more your country has to tell you you're free, the less free you actually are.
Many other countries explicitly do not have free speech in their constitution, but something more narrow, like freedom of opinion. In those countries, what rights the constitution says you get, and what rights you actually get, tend to be more closely in alignment.
US ranks 78 of 80 on the Free Speech Index here, not sure what your metrics are that make it supposedly "very unfree". Perhaps you'd like to share with the class?
> To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface.
I'd really like to know how the front group are controlling Facebook servers to collect data.
