In the US, many laws have been passed, and more proposed, to punish entities who boycott Israel. Entities being individuals, corporations, cities & towns, etc.

And you know what I say to that as an American? I will boycott whoever the fuck I please, whenever I please, for any reason or none at all as I see fit. And if corporations are people too, my friend, then they have the right as well to self-determine who they’ll buy from and who they won’t. And while we’re at it, so do municipalities, and private clubs, any other collection of people singular or plural.

I find such craven obeisance in service of Israel to be personally offensive, and any American who pays attention to how Israel actually behaves with their own two eyes is likely to come to the same conclusion if they are confronted with the issue and think about it for five seconds.

Anyway, that may be a factor behind loud support of boycotting Israel from random American leftoids.

There have in fact been huge discussions of this in the past, which maybe you’d already know about if you didn’t come in hot mouthing off about how things need to be changed to fit your preferences immediately, chop chop!

Turns out the type of blocking you want requires a great deal more code than you (clearly) can imagine in order to be actually functional, as opposed to a fig leaf requiring the full cooperation of every server involved.

This was discussed ad nauseam maybe about 5 years ago, with long hellthreads in microblogging fedi, complex deep-dive technical blog posts, the whole nine yards. No I didn’t save links and I wish I had because this and related issues (Mastodon’s fig leaf “privacy” settings, E2EE DMs) keep coming up.

The answer is that what you are asking for can either be implemented as a porous fig leaf which falls apart the very first time some asshole spins up an instance which doesn’t respect it and vacuums up your posts en masse, or it can be implemented using cryptography which requires an enormous amount of work by extremely well-educated CompSci types to implement a standard, and then implement code libraries, and only then can the developers of platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon get started on implementing the actual feature. No one is paying anyone to do this, and it’s not clear that people with the necessary expertise are even available to develop the standard and the code, nor is it clear that everyone would adopt it if they did. So up til now, it hasn’t been done.

If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

Evidently you missed the many (many) discussions that took place maybe 5 years ago by some of those exact builders about how this is, and remains, only a fig leaf which requires every server to cooperate in maintaining the illusion.

I wish I’d saved links based on how often this comes up. There are fundamental issues with how federated systems in general and ActivityPub in particular work, and “real” blocking is one of them. People running other instances can modify the code however they want, and no technical measures have been implemented (because it turns out to be very difficult to do so) to prevent any node operator from removing the fig leaf.

Including Germany, which has draconian laws against criticizing Israel’s genocidal actions and fascist regime, as demonstrated by the recent drama over feddit.org?

Laws aren’t identical across the EU. If you are aggregating content from a bunch of instances, there will be content aggregated that’s illegal in one place and not another.

If you can stomach bitcoin bros, check out Nostr, it works more like this.

But I don’t like them and don’t want them in my feed.

Mass-market slop troughs exist for a reason.

I, and a lot of other fedizens, don’t want the type of people who use BlueSky and Facebook in my ActivityPub fediverse.

Fedi is cool because it’s small, weird, and highly enriched with people I’m actually interested in communicating with. I don’t need or want the pool to be diluted with an ocean of piss.

The people of Palestine have a right to armed resistance against those who would exterminate them.

The people of Palestine have a right to armed resistance against those who would exterminate them.

The people of Palestine have a right to armed resistance against those who would exterminate them.

Currently in a holding pattern because, while I got RAM & SSD for a new-to-me “1-liter” server before tariffs hit, I don’t have the server itself nor any money to buy one, despite looking for 9th or 10th gen Intel which will cost me only $120 to $150 barebones.

Money to buy one is not coming in because the place where I live has nonstop noise & activity and I don’t have a separate room or any door I can close, which severely limits my ability to work as I have auditory hypersensitivity and an absolute need for solitude in order to recharge enough to think. 🤷🏻

mood

No surprise there, the type of dolts who want to drive around in a Dodge Charger are not the type who are going to buy an EV, especially with the cringe-inducing hype over the fake “Fratzonic” “exhaust” noise.

Good “centrist” Germans and bootlicking, name a more classic combo

The New York Times never fails to reveal its close adherence to its century-plus role as entertainment for the well-to-do who want to play in the trappings of intellectualism without ever having their status quo truly challenged.

Questionable Content is a worlds better artist, this “artist” routinely recycles old art into new slop targeted at r/all

One thing I really like about the author’s fedi coverage, he doesn’t kowtow to rank stupidity and avoid mentioning alternatives because of hivemind disapproval.

From a publisher (user) perspective, Nostr’s censorship resistance by design blows the doors off of what ActivityPub can claim in that regard. And I say that as someone who’s been pretty much all-in on ActivityPub fedi since its inception (almost a decade, wow)

everybody downvoting your comment has zero experience being the go-to family tech guy for relatives in their 80s and 90s who can’t reliably distinguish between windows, dialog boxes, menus, and buttons

Ah okay, this is what I was thinking of.

Sounds like Peertube admins can also proactively choose to mirror videos from other instances too?

Very nice. Would be cool to get some kind of massive user influx and see how well it does under load.

Thanks for doing this.