this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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How can it be abused and to what end? You can go to any (instanceurl)/instances to see what it's federated to.
A similar tool has existed for years and it is run by Kiwifarms with the primary purpose of ban evasion for trolling and harrassment campaigns.
KF has a fedi site?
sadly yes.
who is kiwifarms?
You are lucky that you don't know. But people elsewhere in this thread have explained already.
thanks for letting me know, i found a wikipedia link in the thread.
You get a list of the instances that have defederated from you, and you mount a coordinated attack against them
Yeah the only polite response, until we end in M.A.D. those poor botnet owners need a hand.
No I'm just saying how this can be used in an attack. I'm certainly not advocating attacks of any kind.
Same here, I was just attempting to joke.
Ahhh my bad. Fell for Poe's Law lol
On mastodon, in my circles at least, it's taboo to link to the equivalent for mastodon. It makes any harassment campaigning, trolling and re-routing much easier. Unless you're willing to build the tool yourself, you just don't really know these numbers. Once you use the tool (and I have seen and used it), you see very easily who the big defederators etc are.
I'm going to bet that this tool is not worth what ever value or curiosity it provides. It so easily puts targets on instances backs, including smaller instances that are probably easy targets.
I think it's probably the most important piece of information to have when choosing a server.
While a lot of people have said "it can be used for harassment", I've not seen any information yet on how that could be. On the contrary, I think being open and up-front about federation policies is important for a healthy community - it avoids arguments about going behind people's backs.
I'm with you on the transparency and policies. Completely.
But there's a big difference between
policiesand a public page that tells the trolls "you have been defederated by all of these people".