Blocking specific mastodon users

[bekopharm]

Same problem like #889 with Mastodon. Talking to my instance admin to block some mindless bot accounts instance wide. That won't help with all cases, of course. Reading the block list from the instance is probably the way to go. I dunno about the API but the block list can be exported as CSV via e.g. https://social.tchncs.de/settings/exports/blocks.csv as well.

Edith says: There is also https://social.tchncs.de/settings/exports/mutes.csv and https://social.tchncs.de/settings/exports/domain_blocks.csv

I read https://indieweb.org/moderation but processing spam that occurs on each single post made doesn't sounds feasible as well.

Mastodon has a bot flag btw. Not all bots abide, of course, but it may be an idea to ignore such reactions at all as well.

[snarfed]

thanks for the suggestion! yup, i've been considering using your per-user Mastodon block list, like we already do for Twitter: https://brid.gy/about#blocked .

the catch is the domain (ie instance) level blocks, https://docs.joinmastodon.org/usage/privacy/#hiding-an-entire-server , which Twitter doesn't have. this is tracked in snarfed/granary#173. it's not hard to implement, i just need a way to represent it in ActivityStreams 1, granary's base data format.

and yes, we definitely also encourage people to moderate and block within their own sites! you can do anything you want there, beyond just moderating individual webmentions one by one. eg you can block users and whole domains permanently if you want.

[snarfed]

oh, also, if your admin blocks accounts and domains instance wide, i assume your instance won't accept their toots or interactions at all, so i'd never get them from the API in the first place, right?

[bekopharm]

That's true. If it's blocked instance wide nothing will show up from my understanding as well.

[snarfed]

done! we now obey your personal block list on mastodon, just like on twitter. thanks for the nudge! tentatively closing.