fedi dev discussion, longpost
There was Big Drama in the LttP rando racing scene ages ago, when someone wrote a mapping/tracking tool. It was the first one of its kind and there was concern it bordered on cheating.
So a lot of back and forth and arguments happened and people asked the devs to remove features because they could be used to cheat in races. Eventually they kind of did.
But it felt so misguided to vee that you have this thing that has a purpose and a use, and people who don't even want to use it roll up and demand you make changes to it.
And I guess I get a lot of those same feels with some stuff going on in fedi development this week with a GtS feature that's being tested out. If you're not safeguarding against an illicit use-case, changing one software feature doesn't make you safe.
Come to think of it, this has the same flavor as the "Pleroma lets you evade blocks" stuff too. Of course it didn't; it couldn't. What Pleroma did was not honor federation of blocks, so it couldn't "Know" a block came in to sever follow links.
But also I've been trying to think more in terms of "Software doesn't happen in a vacuum" now and days. I dunno where that line actually falls any more.
re: fedi dev discussion, longpost
@trysdyn oh okay that doesn't sound like a big deal at all unless you really need that big number I suppose xD
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re: fedi dev discussion, longpost
@noiob For like... 2 commits there's been a feature in
mainthat lets one configure an instance to return obviously bogus, randomized, fake user/post/etc counts in nodeinfo as a privacy measure.It got noticed by the pixelfed guy, I suspect because he was trying to count up software/user totals to see how pixelfed was doing, and now here we are.