Fediseer

The fediseer now allows instance admins to self-tag their instance as they want. Those tags can then be consumed via the API.

For example, one could use these tags to discover all instances focusing one or more topics at the same time. Places like pangora.social can use them to find more instances to suggest in their lists.

On the flip side, instance admins can also use them to help improve their blocklists in a "positive" manner. For example, let's say that you want your instance to be SFW, you could explicitly block any instance self reporting as "porn" or "gore" etc. Along with the endorsements and hesitations, this would provide a lot of tools to ensure you associate only with the people you fit well.

You can add or delete tags in the GUI or directly via the API as an instance admin

The new tags_csv arg on the /whitelist endpoint, will also return all instances which match any of the tags in your csv.

Let us know what you think and remember you can support the fediseer development on liberapay. Alternatively you can also sponsor the individual developers on github: db0 | rikudou

So, I recently requested to add my single-tenant instance to the Fediseer catalog. I entered my community and user name in the website, and out of caution I chose to use the Mastodon proxy to receive the confirmation message. Over 24 hours later, the API code has not arrived. And when I try to request it again, I get the following error:

There was an api error: You have already claimed this instance as this admin. Please use the PATCH method to reset your API key.

Problem is, the PATCH method requires my API key which, as discussed above, never arrived at all! Is there some mechanism for the instance claim to time out after a certain period so I can try again, or am I officially out of luck?

Introducing Momiji: a Gopher interface for Fediseer!

gopher://geidontei.chaotic.ninja/1/usr/mima/momiji/

Since the official web GUI of #Fediseer requires JavaScript (seriously what's up with that, is this a Lemmy thing lol :P), I thought I'd write something that uses Fediseer's API, and the interface wouldn't need JavaScript to be loaded from the website and can be viewed by any plaintext-friendly client. So I settled with #Gopher! ​:alice_wine:​

Currently you can only lookup some basic information per instance, and see all domains which they have endorsed, censured, hesitated, and guaranteed (and vice-versa) in a pure plain text format. I might write an interface for the whitelisted, suspicious, censured, and hesitated lists of instances too, but I'm not promising anything. :P As it stands, this simple Gopher CGI fits my needs for now. ​:kokoro_yes:​

Logging in with your #API key is not supported (probably a bad idea anyway due to Gopher typically being unencrypted ​:satsuki_sadge:​), so you won't be able to see some domain lists of instances that have restricted the viewing of endorsements/censures/hesitations they give, or modify anything in Fediseer.

It's all written in #POSIX #shell script, with the dcgi currently written with #Geomyidae's gophermap format in mind. You can see the source code (which you can treat as being in the public domain) in the URL I've given. Warning: It's pure shell script cancer! ​:kyou:​

@fediseer@lemmy.dbzer0.com

New update just dropped with some cool new features.

More Fediverse Software

The Fediseer API knowledge has been expanded to handle better some more fediverse software. Specifically it will now try to discover misskey admins, and it can better go through the firefish and mastodon API.

Uptime and Refresh

The Fediseer will now periodically (twice per day) attempt to refresh the info from instances it knows about. It will just check the node and instance info APIs for the relevant info and update its database in case it's out of date. This will allow us, say, to know when an instance who used to have completely open registrations without captcha, switched to better control registrations.

This process will also be used to mark instances being down. Any instance with 1-2 consecutive failures, will be marked as "unreachable". 3-60 will mark it as "offline" and any more will mark it a decommissioned. In the future I plan to handle decommissioned instances differently.

User Registration info

To help with figuring out if an instance is a good candidate for a guarantee, we now report more fields relevant to making this decisions, for example whether that instance requires application approval or if they're using a captcha

Also ,gentle reminder to also now and then check the solicitations page to see if any new instances is asking for a guarantee! If you see anyone you can verify is not a spam instance, place guarantee for them!

Funding

Finally, I want to mention that we've opened a liberapay funding for the fediseer development. If you think this tool is helping you work as fediverse instance administrators, please do consider sponsoring our infrastructure and further development:

https://liberapay.com/Fediseer/

We've released a new GUI version which brings two important changes:

• Synchronizing from Lemmy blocklist to your Fediseer censure list - you now don't have to rewrite the domains manually and can import them with a single click
• Multiple accounts support - if you have multiple instances, you can now switch between all your Fediseer accounts easily.

There have also been many bugfixes and small enhancements in previous release, as usual, read the Changelog if you're interested in details.

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.

Hello Lemmyverse!

First of all we want to say THANK YOU to both @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com and @rikudou@lemmings.world for making this happen. The addition of tags, censures and hesitations following Rikudou's GUI being included to Fediseer offically has done a lot to bring this tool to the next level. As we said before, on Lemmy World we now implemented this tool in our flow on how to handle spam- or other types of abusive instances. The system also had his first test-run this week when there was a spam-wave of accounts from different instances and we were able to fend those off by temporarely adding the instances to our hesitations list. Once the admins of those instances were contacted and tightened up security a bit they were removed from our hesitation list and re-federated.

dbzer0.com was protected during that time because they followed Lemmy World's hesitations and therefor their communities also remained spam-free!

We're looking forward to see how this evolves, when more and more admins start using this tool - allowing us to protect eachother.

So lastly, we want would like to point the instance admins that are reading this to https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world

As you see we've spent quite a bit of time going over different blocklists from instances and combining them into the Lemmy World one. We're also going over the Fediverse-Blocklist and adding instances from there.

The worst offenders are already in the list, but we'll keep working on making our list as complete as possible. Due to the size of our instance we are often the first ones to be targeted. And on the other hand we also have a big admin team so we also quickly notice when something is going on. So we hope that making this information available through Fediseer will help keeping instances and their communities protected and turn a negative into something good.

Greetings, The Lemmy World team

A new functionality has been added to the Fediseer which should allow people to both find more instances to guarantee easier, and also to help new instances to request such guarantees.

For new instances, you can visit this page: https://gui.fediseer.com/solicitations/create

You can then submit a request to be guaranteed and also optionally provide a comment about it.

For those already guaranteed, you can now check which other instances are requesting a guarantee in this page: https://gui.fediseer.com/solicitations

You can then further follow up on them, and guarantee them directly from that page.

Likewise requests for guarantees are now also visible in the action log page.

Also, if an instance had a guarantee and it was withdrawn, they will receive an automatic solicitation entry, so that people can immediately notice this and re-apply their guarantee if warranted.

So if you want to help ensure the smooth on-boarding of new instances, do check back on active solicitations and approve them if you think they're legit!

So, I just got my guarantee for pnpde.social and got busy guaranteeing our neighbourhood of ttrpg centric mastodon instances but I ran into some kind of quota:

Error: There was an api error: You cannot guarantee for more than 20 instances

Is this permanent or a daily limit? Got a couple neighbours more 😎

Quite a lot has changed since the last time I posted about the GUI!

Here's a non-exhaustive list of new features:

• synchronization between Fediseer and Lemmy
• synchronization between Fediseer and Mastodon
• hesitations (basically milder version of censures) are supported
• action log
• evidences / receipts

This is only a short list of some notable features, but I don't want to exhaust you, if you're interested, for a full list of changes you can go to https://github.com/RikudouSage/FediseerGUI/releases.

A lot of new features have been added to the Fediseer today.

First is the addition of Hesitations. They are functionally identical to censures but are meant to represent something more akin to "distrust" rather than outright disapproval. The aim is that you can use these to mark instances towards which you would like to be more cautious. How you implement this cautiousness is up to you and your software.

For example, in Mastodon you could set all instances you doubt as "Silenced". Or you could reject all images coming from them. If you have the dev chops, you could try mark them in your UI somehow. Or admin tools could mark them for review by mods.

Like censures, you can mix and match hesitations of multiple instances together and filter by reasons and min_hesitations.

The second feature is the PM proxy. I have just created the account @fediseer@botsin.space which can be used to PM instances instead of @fediseer@fediseer.com. While the built-in fediseer messaging works well, it's a lot of development to figure out how to make with every new APub software coming out.

So as to allow many more instance admins to join the fediseer, they can switch the pm_proxy key when registering to 'MASTODON' from none. This will make fediseer PM their API key via the @fediseer@botsin.space account.

If you plan to follow this approach, ensure that botsin.space is not blocked by your instance and I would suggest you follow @fediseer@botsin.space in advance, to ensure you receive the API key PM

Likewise admins who have claimed their instance can switch the pm_proxy to 'MASTODON' or 'NONE' permanently in the same place they would reset their API key. But be aware that when you do this, fediseer will PM all admins of that instance via both new and old proxy, to ensure that they are aware.

With this update, I'm no longer rejecting software except Mastodon, Lemmy and Friendica. Now admins of Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks like Firefish can claim their instances as well!

Another thing added is meta reasons. You can now specify __all_bigots__ or __all_pedos__ in your censure reasons, and it will ensure that it filters in all variations of those reasons. For example, __all_bigots__ will add into your reasons "racism, sexism, transphobia, bigotry" and the like.

Finally, Endorsements can now also have reasons, and likewise now also support the same type of filtering as censures. This was from a suggestion from someone who was considering using endorsements as an allow-list. The reasons then would enable other instances using endorsements for allow-list to better be able to filter who to allow.

To support people being ably to verify the reasons for censures, the fediseer now allows you to submit evidence along with the reasons for a censure. We provide up to 1000 chars to write whatever you want, but the suggested use is posting URLs, preferrably to a domain you control which contain further links and screenshots.

Example evidence link that I am using: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/3906719

You can use this as an RSS feed to see what recent changes have happened on fediseer recently. It also supports filtering per source/target domain, or activity type.

It doesn't contain any changes before now though.

@rikudou@lemmings.world has been very kind to build a new GUI from scratch and make it easily hostable. So I've done just that and deployed a version that I control under gui.fediseer.com

After I saw this post from beehaw.org,and this post about mastodon I thought of this feature to allow instance administrators to report how many sysadmins and how many moderators they have on staff for their instance.

The idea is that one can use this information to see if any instances are struggling to maintain themselves based on their size. For example, an instance of 10K users like lemmy.dbzer0.com would not be manageable without extra support.

Why these two roles specifically? because in my experience, these are the most important ones for a fediverse instance to have and it's unlikely the owner of the instance is good enough to do both at the same time. For example, I'm a great sysadmin, but I suck at moderation duties.

Both of these skills tend to be OK to leave to one person if an instance is small (say, below 1000 users), where the owner can get away with relying on searchable docker commands and and built-in moderation tools. However above that number, an inexperienced owner at one or both of these will find themselves in trouble.

This information starts as null for each claimed or guaranteed instance on the fediseer, which effectively means "unknown". Instance admins who have claimed their instances can then use the PATCH option on the /api/v1/whitelist endpoint to specify how many sysadmins and/or moderators they currently have.

curl -X 'PATCH' \
  'https://fediseer.com/api/v1/whitelist/lemmy.dbzer0.com' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'apikey: YOUR_KEY_HERE' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "sysadmins": 1,
  "moderators": 3
}'

Yes, one can also see how many "admins" an instance has from their public info, but a lot of fediverse software do not provide the full picture. For example mastodon only shows one admin, whereas lemmy admins have no distinction between the two. So you could see a lemmy instance with 4 admins, of which they're all moderators, and they have no experience sysadmin on staff.

My hope is that this information can then be used to find instances where people can volunteer support, and also be used by tools suggesting new instances to promote instances with good staff health.

You can now specify extra domains to pull into your censures. You can also specify only specific reasons to censure (for example, censure only loli and csam). Finally you can now also specify the min_censures to use to add to your list.

For example you might want to use 10 different instances as your trusted censure reference, but only block instances censured by at least 5 of them

Fediseer has been updated to allow filtering on /api/v1/censures_given on reasons and amount of censures. it also reports amount of censures per domain

This allows you to use it as a join OR as an intersect, OR as a percentage based.

The below url, will perform an intesection on the censures given by 3 different reference instances:

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/censures_given/lemmy.dbzer0.com%2Cprogramming.dev%2Clemmings.world?min_censures=3

The below will filter only domains which at least one of the reference instances has censured them for "loli"

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/censures_given/lemmy.dbzer0.com%2Cprogramming.dev%2Clemmings.world?reasons_csv=loli

You can combine these two filters as well

The below will return only domains where at least 2 of the reference instances have marked them as "loli"

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/censures_given/lemmy.dbzer0.com%2Cprogramming.dev%2Clemmings.world?min_censures=2&reasons_csv=loli

I've created a Fediseer frontend that's easy to use!

URL: https://fediseer.lemmings.world Source: https://github.com/RikudouSage/FediseerGUI

@fediseer Fediseer can now censure wildcard domains

You can now censure an a wildcard domain on #fediseer which can be useful for ingesting your censures intto a blocklist for problematic domains who are playing games.

#fediblockmeta

I noticed a PM reply to the fediseer from an endorsed instance admin (@stefan@gardenstate.social) telling us they didn't understand what that PM means.

So I set about writing an FAQ which would allow me to link to it as part of the PMs I'm sending to the various admins.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any more questions you'd like me to address, please post them here.