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@feditips I was reading your excellent website (thank you for this great resource, btw, it's been very helpful) on the topic of defederation, and I found myself with a question that didn't seem to be answered. Is it possible for a server admin to take a whitelist-approach instead of a blacklist one? That is, to make defederation the default, but be able to selectively federate with some servers.

@prestontumber

Not on Mastodon, at least not easily.

However, there are other Fediverse server types which do take an allowlist approach such as @gotosocial

(BTW the whitelist/blacklist thing is nowadays generally allowlist/blocklist 👍 )

@feditips @gotosocial

Thanks for the information! And the new terminology sounds good, I was wondering why I hadn't seen the older ones around much. I think the new ones make more sense.

There was a post cautioning folks against hosting federated social media on Dreamwidth, have you seen it? It kinda spooked me.

@prestontumber

I don't know anything about Dreamwidth hosting, sorry!

@feditips Oh, I misspoke. What I meant was that I saw this article: denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.ht

I'm really interested in the Fediverse but that seems like a lot of liability.

FediTips has moved!

@prestontumber

Ahh okay, yeah, legal issues are important to consider if you are running a public server. (Not so much if it's a private server.)

This is going to be true for any public online service, whether it's federated or not. A non-federated site will have just as much legal responsibility for its content.

It's also going to vary depending on where you are, where the host is etc etc.

I'm not a lawyer, so my article tries to make clear that I can't advise on these particular things.

@feditips

Thanks! It's a pity that Mastodon doesn't have features for an allowlist approach, I feel like if someone wanted a small but still public instance that would be a great technical tool to help mitigate some of those risks.

@prestontumber

Mastodon does technically have an allowlist option called "Limited Federation Mode":

fedi.tips/creating-an-isolated

However, it cannot be activated within the admin interface. You would need someone with system administrator skills to put your server into this mode.

fedi.tipsUsing allowlists on Mastodon servers through Limited Federation Mode | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the FediverseAn unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse