[kwlug-disc] The Fediverse is complicated

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ronald Barnes (ron at ronaldbarnes.ca):

> Late Night Linux podcast covered running one's own Mastodon
> instance, and there are some surprises.
> 
> Guest Alan Pope (@popey), from Canonical, ran / runs one and found
> quite a lot of media on his instance, from sources that appeared in
> his timeline.
> 
> i.e. Nothing he'd ever looked at, videos and photos he didn't
> recognize at all.
[...] 
> Comes from the Federated Timeline.

What have we learned?

1.  There's a reason why all established Mastodon instances have a 
well-curated moderated servers list and filters, to systematically
exclude categories of traffic you don't want to federate.  If you
have non-you local users, you also have a local moderation issue.

2.  Social network protocols are... social.  Don't volunteer to move
other people's data around unless you are prepared to move other
people's data around.