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.

@trysdyn what's happening with GTS??