The #ContentNation situation is a dumpster fire for the #Fediverse. What would you do if you were building something, people misunderstood what it was, and things escalated to a point that someone loaded CSAM onto your server for the sake of reporting it?
@hello specifically, it wasn't that "someone loaded CSAM onto your server", it was "I federated with the entire internet, including servers known to publish CSAM and showed all that content along side totally normal legal content"
That is, there was a failure to do approval-based federation or to implement domain blocks for well known bad domains.
It doesn't take much to discover DNI instances.
The act done was simply seeing CSAM via their feature & reporting it to their webhost.
@hello like, I'm not saying reporting to the webhost first was the right move, but as a commercial entity, Sascha's lawyers should've advised him that allowing anyone to serve arbitrary content on his site without having a user account, is a really terrible idea.
Starting in limited federation would have been a better idea, along with restricting search of remote content to logged in users.
Those two things would've largely mitigated this problem & likely the backlash.
@thisismissem@hello actually, we were taking a different approach here, in that Hello is simply an outreach / syndication channel. It’s a little weird, but felt less weird than wedistribute@social.wedistribute.org 😅
Eventually, the hope is to set up several different channels and some automation to pipe things around. You can kind of see that in progress with @decentered. though it isn’t perfect.
Being able to follow scientists' new publications even if they aren't personally on here would be useful. But the Bridgy Fed harassment has given me some pause. Academics are incentivized to be as public as possible about their articles, so I'm having trouble imagining backlash. Then again I didn't imagine the Bluesky bridge backlash...
@julian@hello This is the most disappointing part of building things in the fediverse. I’ve had a few fun ideas using the Mastodon API, but don’t release or follow through because of the nastiness I’ve seen around other projects that stretch beyond the current functionality. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
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