The “moderation is coming” release¶

The past month I’ve been working on moderation. (Mostly.)

This represents the last big hurdle^[1] before I can start actively pursuing server to server interactions.

Moderation¶

The first steps (in my eyes) for valid cross-instance moderation is allowing users to silence other users, threads, or full instances.

In this release I added the capability for users to block other users. It is not fully up to spec, as I’m not entirely sure how to “prevent the blocked user from interacting with any object posted by the actor”.

The way I interpret this statement is that users shouldn’t be allowed to see objects created by users that block them, which is not really feasible in my opinion, since the blocked user can access those same objects if they’re not using authentication when retrieving them.

In littr.me the blocking mechanism requires providing a text “reason” before being sent to the server. This would allow a user to remember why they blocked someone else, and also, as a general warning for others to see in the moderation log.

Speaking of the moderation log, currently, the Block activities generated are not publicly disseminated, and as such are not visible to other users. This proves to be an issue as users can’t see the activities because they’re private to the account that created them. I need to find a suitable method of allowing public access to an anonymised version of the activity.

Privately stored activities¶

Most of the time, however I spent working on the go-ap packages, because this feature served as the start point for a large detour in the storage layer of #fedbox, the #activitypub service that constitutes the backend of littr.me, which resulted in the capability of storing “private” activities in actors’ outboxes.

This is a very important step forward in removing the need for a custom “activities” collection for #fedbox.

Next steps¶

Next I’m planning to add Flag activity support, and maybe Ignore, even though I’m not entirely sure what differences there should be in how the server treats one in comparison to a Block.

[1] From the “famous last words” department.