Until now the all lists of endorsements, censures and hesitations an instance has created, have been public. This is due to the primary purpose of the fediseer which is to allow people to freely combine and filter multiple lists from their trusted sources to arrive to an optimal choice for the blocklists (or allow-lists).
However some the people with experience from the microblogging communities mentioned that such lists are a typical way hateful bigots and fascists use to find targets to abuse. They would gather instances which have defederated their lairs, and begin a concentrated harassment campaign against their admins and so on.
To help prevent this scenario, the Fediseer now allows instance admins to choose the visibility of each of their endorsements, censures and hesitation lists. The available options are OPEN (the current default), ENDORSED which will only display the list's contents to admins of instances which have been endorsed by the source instance, and PRIVATE which will only display the list's contents to the admins of the source instance.
This should provide a way for close-knit communities to collaborate on blocks and allows while preventing their enemies from using those lists to facilitate harassment.
We of course can't prevent the block and allow lists from being public on your software itself, but if in the future fediverse software provides a way to hide such lists, the fediseer could be used to allow for the powerful dynamics of crowdsourcing of those lists while keeping the admins safe(r).
But that's not all. This release also brings some more new features
- You can now filter the action log, by source or target domain, and action types.
- You can now revoke your own guarantee (in case you want someone else to guarantee for you)
Finally I want to mention that we have opened a fediseer liberapay donation page. If you appreciate what we're trying to achieve and want to support our efforts, please consider donating. The link is also visible on the GUI on the bottom left.
