Overall the influx of people is a good way to get feedback on what's priority. We tend to look at bigger milestones, but often a collection of details is important as a foundation.

@yangwao you might be interested in: %gVFvcYy....
also, check out a search for "private groups" or even "fractal groups".

@substack interested to know what you were using a block for.
Agree it could be time to re-visit this. I think there's a bunch of scope for how to visually display a range of meta-data your friends could attach to one another (including block / fraudulent), let alone how and what this influences the replication protocol.

I think there's a bunch of scope for how to visually display a range of meta-data your friends could attach to one another (including block / fraudulent), let alone how and what this influences the replication protocol.

@mix why not copy what Patchwork Classic did? it seemed to work well in practice, what do you think specifically should be changed?

basically when you blocked someone, it would ask you the reason, and then that reason would be displayed on that person's profile as a warning for everyone in your neighborhood to see.

i did some code archaeology to find exactly how this was done, see a search for "flag" in Patchwork Classic and scuttlebutt.io documentation on vote messages as flags.

basically, a "block" is two messages:

• a contact message with { blocking: true } (which is already handled in replication by scuttlebot)

{
  "type": "contact",
  "contact": "@...",
  "blocking": true
}

and

• a -1 vote message to the user key, with a reason attached

{
  "type": "vote",
  "vote": {
    "link": "@...",
    "value": -1,
    "reason": "abuse"
  }
}

A positive vote on a user signals trust in that user. It's generally used to "confirm" that you think that user publishes good information.

A negative vote on a user is a "flag." You can flag a user for publishing bad information, making false claims, or being abusive. You can also flag a user if the owner lost the keys.

Common values for reason in downvotes on users:

• dead: Dead Account / Lost Keys
• spam: Spammer
• abuse: Abusive behavior

so, what if we implemented this, as it was before Patchwork v3?

i see in %+SJ+Cvq... some feedback from @keks, that it'd be nice to silently block: as in create the contact message to stop replication but not the additional vote message to show up on their profile.

@mikey I disagree that actually worked, being flagged just annoyed that guy more, but he eventually got bored and went away.

Another problem with the pw-classic user flag thing is that the options where hardcoded, and didn't fit well. graabin wasn't really doing abuse (making people feel unsafe) he was more getting on every thread and making it be about his own pet topic (which happened to be paranoid conspiracy theories), but when he was flagged as "abuse" he could claim an injustice against him.

The original blocking code was more about stopping them from seeing your messages, because that was the hard, interesting part. In practice, a simple mute would probably be better.

Incidentially, @mixmix has recently been working on a filter for patchbay (for decluttering rather than filtering content, but same problem really)

@Dominic, sure. i'm still interested in many ways to signal feedback, in the spectrums of positive to neutral to negative, and public to private to silent (personal). i'm not convinced a silent mute alone is enough for a community to self-police bad behavior, i think in some cases it's important to talk about what is wrong so a community can learn together about what they value or don't value, so they can coordinate better.

i'm not convinced a silent mute alone is enough for a community to self-police bad behavior

I'm not saying it's the end of the conversation, just that it's the simplest thing that is a step in the right direction.

one thing that I think would be simple and would help alot (at me) i to have a "view" where you only see the post of the ppl you follow, and not your extended socail graph