Fediseer

Cross-posted from "Threativore can now keep your blocklist in sync with your Fediseer censures" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

The new release of Threativore adds Fediseer integration. It will allow you to keep your instance blocklist in sync with your fediseer censures. Not only that but the integration can be as fine-grained as you want, supporting collating multiple instance censures, filtering only censures with tags you want, or only censures collaborated by 1+ other instances etc.

Check out the usage manual for all the variables allowed.

For people who only want some basic protection, the default settings will by default protect you from all CSAM and bigoted instances as tagged by lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.world and lemmings.world. This should provide a good initial blocklist even if you don't populate fediseer yourself Bbut you can of course mix&match according to your needs.

This integration also prevents too many changes happening at one go in your blocklist. If threativore detects too many changes about to happen, it will ask for admin approval via DM before proceeding.

This sync will run every 10 minutes, so if you're following the censures of other instances and they discover a new bad actor, you'll be almost immediately protected, thus converting a fediverse weakness (information distribution) into a strength (information collaboration).

Let me know if you wish to see any improvements.

Let's go for 5 and 10 at least!

Cannot claim an instance because of API error both with or without mastodon

Edit solution: allowlist gui.fediseer.com

There's a few open solicitations. Please take a look and guarantee for whoever doesn't look like spam to improve the health of the chain.

I should arrange somehow so that the newest instance to be guarantee'd automatically gets pinged when someone solicits one, just to keep things going as nobody pays attention.

I made a much desired regional instance for Ukraine as I wanted us to have a home to discuss our stories and culture.

It's currently running on a K&T host but hopefully we will eventually migrate to Ukrainian servers in the future as I learn more about the innerworkings of running a Lemmy instance.

I created my instance after getting tired of Reddit.

It's just me for now. I'm hosted on Elestio, running in Docker, goal is to curate info and relationships with good people. Let me know if you need any more info, please.

There's a bunch soliciting guarantees. As part of fediseer, it falls on all of us to maintain it. So please check the new instances and guarantee for any that are not spam (which should be most).

Click this link to guarantee for some instances

Also reminder if you're the admin of an instance requesting a guarantee, by specifying who should be your guarantor, you will send them a PM to ask them.

New instances require a guarantee to use fediseer to its max capability. If you see an instance and you validate it's not spammy, go ahead and guarantee for it.

If you yourself want to solicit a guarantee, remember that you can input a target instance when you do so, and their admins will receive a PM from the fediseer to do it for you.

Do you have to have a guarantee to be listed? Can you have more than one?

If you have a guaranteed instance, please consider guaranteeing for other. The only requirement is that they're not spam.

Simply tag your instance according to some of your core topics, and if you have at least 50 users, pangora.social will display you an option when people are looking for a server to register in!

Spread it forward!

I've been noticing a bug whenever I go to the page of an instance that doesn't yet exist in the database:

Usually after refreshing, the page shows as usual (assuming after Fediseer was able to download/parse the instance's /api/v1/instance or /.well-known/nodeinfo-2.0 or whatever). Anyone else encounter this? I'm on Firefox 118.0.2 (64-bit) on Fedora release 38 (Thirty Eight)

Plus a funny devtools thing I saw for the spinner lol: https://streamable.com/lgg7xy

I added my Mastodon instance to Fediseer GUI and then got errors with the 0auth API token, so I deleted it on the Mastodon side. Is there a way to update the token in Fediseer?

Right now Fediseer GUI is just taking me to the login page for my instance when I try to synchronize

Heres a little guide for how to tag your community properly for it to get pulled into showing up on https://pangora.social/join . First youll need to get added to the whitelist by making an issue on the repository or asking me.

The tags used on the site follow a pattern

• If the category has no subcommunities then the tag to show up there is usually its name or something similar to its name in lower kebab case
• If the category has subcommunities then the tag to show up in the "general" category of the tag is the same as above but then -general if added onto the end

For example some of the tags for the technology category and subcategories are:

• technology-general
• programming-general
• web-development
• game-development
• ai
• radio
• cybersecurity

Ill be exposing a full tag list once I get the feature fully set up in pangora.social (still in Ludum Dare mode but should hopefully happen in the second half of this month (for now ill make a comment here with them)

If you add tags it wont show up until then but you can do it now to get it set up

Its recommended to only tag your instance for topics youre catered towards or have a large community for. General communities that dont focus on one kind of content can just tag themselves as "general"

As an example of tagging. Heres the current tag setup for programming.dev programming programming-general game-development web-development

the programming tag is useless in the eyes of pangora.social but I like doing it to show that youre in that category of content for other uses in fediseer. programming-general lets us show up in the general programming category since were a general programming instance. game-development and web-development are tagged since we currently have the largest communities for both topics

If you have any suggestions for new categories let me know

Just FYI, the /whitelist api now has pagination, so if you're consuming this with automated tools, please make sure you take it into account.

I will also soon be adding pagination to censures, endorsements and hesitations, it will follow the same format, so make sure you are prepared to handle it as well.

Informing in advance so that your tools don't break,

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:​

@[email protected]

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.