[French below]
There has been growing discussions on the Fediverse about how to improve moderation and limit hate speech and harassment on our platforms (see for instance this post on SocialHub).
Among other things, a point that is often raised is the inability of moderators and admins to keep up with the emergence of new « bad » instances.
Because of this, they are often blocked only after it’s too late and people have been hurt.
In that context, opt-in federation has again been proposed.
I’ve seen that PeerTube proposes a parameter to manually approve follows but I’m not sure what that means.
Is there a way to make sure that no content from another instance X will be shared by the instance until the admin manually approves federation with X?
This behavior would be important to avoid the spread of disinformation through federation (which is currently happening a lot).
Il y a de plus en plus de discussion sur le Fédivers pour savoir comment améliorer la modération et limiter les appels à la haine et le harcèlement sur nos plateformes (voir par exemple ce post sur SocialHub).
Entre autre choses, un point qui revient souvent est l’incapacité des modérateurs à suivre l’émergence de nouvelles instances « nuisibles ».
De ce fait, elles sont souvent bloquées seulement après les faits, donc après que des personnes aient été blessées.
Dans ce contexte, l’idée de rendre la fédération « opt-in » a à nouveau été évoquée.
J’ai vu que PeerTube propose un réglage pour « Approuver manuellement une nouvelle instance qui souhaite vous suivre » mais je ne suis pas sûr de ce que ça implique.
Est-ce qu’il est possible de s’assurer qu’aucun contenu en provenance d’une autre instance X n’est partagé sur l’instance tant que l’admin n’a pas manuellement approuvé la fédération avec X ?
Ce réglage serait important pour éviter de propager de la désinformation du fait de la fédération automatique (ce qui se produit malheureusement beaucoup à l’heure actuelle).
note: our post is in the english PeerTube subforum, so I’ll answer in english.
You have to realize that an instance A won’t show videos from third-party instances that just follow A. For this, A has to manually follow them (or use an auto-follow list but that’s already asking for trouble IMHO). Opt-in is already the default ways things work in the PeerTube federation!
So just manually accepting follows (which is possible to set btw) doesn’t impact what content gets displayed on A’s side. It just impacts where content local to A gets shown.
OK, thanks @rigelk and @JohnLivingston for the answers.
Indeed, spam comments are already a problem, but not necessarily as bad as what I had in mind.
Glad to hear that opt-in federation is the default, though that really comes as a surprise then, given how much crap I’ve seen the « trending » tabs of several instances…
Are there plugins that make auto-federation possible or are so many admins using scripts to mass-federate?
Yes, auto-federation is possible by adding an instance list, as mentioned above. Some admins just use it to follow an index like instances.joinpeertube.org, which is why you see that.
OK, and I see that indeed there are instances like runtube.re and justtelly.com on the list, so that’s probably the source of the problem…
Thanks for the information.
By the way, is it possible to report users to the admins of a remote instance (like in Mastodon) or are reports limited to the local admins.
Could you be more specific?
Is it done automatically whenever a report is filed on a video shared on the local instance or is there something more to do?
