Blacklisting pods that could abuse the system?

Features and Ideas
1

I’ve been thinking about D* a lot lately and I am wondering, among other things, what could possibly harm Diaspora’s wonderful decentralized architecture once it starts attracting users by the millions.

Let’s say for example that some wealthy/greedy/shady company creates multiple D* pods which all accept tons of users. These pods could theoretically host the majority of the Diaspora users over time. Then, nothing would stop this greedy company to add some privacy invasive code on their own pods. Basically, what I am saying it that there would be a risk that the D* network gets contaminated by an important group of “bad citizens” (pods).

If there was a way for podmins to blacklist other pods, this could help the community to weaken the influence of the offending servers.

This information could be visible for every users as well. Let’s say for example that you are reading your stream. You read a post from user XYZ and you notice a note near the user name that says something like this : “this user is registered on a pod that has been blacklisted by 10 different other pods.” .

This would at least give the community a way to “fight back” against pods that abuse the system. I’m still unsure about this idea myself, I’m just trying to think in advance so that D* remains in the hands of the community at all time.

Also, I’m really not saying we should do something about this now. I know this is not a problem at the moment and that there are more important things to do. But I think it is something worthwhile to discuss. What’s your take on this?

Thanks for reading!

Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.

2

Something like this is a good idea… this is the weakest point in diaspora’s architecture… I would say client side encryption so podmins don’t have access and an easy installer might be higher priorities, though…

3

Interesting…

This thread is going to open the censorship can of worms for sure :wink:

4

It’s obviously a weak point, but due to the “Libre” nature of Diaspora itself ! The code is open, so you can take it, read it, modify and execute it… Since a modification is seen as an improvement, it will spread. And wether or not it spreads, the end we could imagine is a kind of fork, between traditional D*, and -let’s say- business led D*, which could have ads or user tracking…

I do not think we can avoid this to happen if in a favorable future D* becomes growing and growing. Business makers will always look for something they can make money with.

So, adding an information about the server is an idea, which could be usefull anyway, even to state a lack of communication between some pods. (i.e. “I get a lots of posts, but none from my twelve fiends which are on the xyz pod”).

This may result in a stigmatization of “villain” pods’ users. They possibly could feel like unwanted, blacklisted (themselves, more than their pods). And maybe split the D* community. I imagine the worse case, i admit ^^

So, briefly, I think it’s a good idea to add at least the user’s pod on the stream and the PM. Or, maybe a filter, so I will automatically ignore users that are on a bad pod… But, in order to prevent Business les pods to agglomerate more and more user without a way for them to fly, I think we should at first have the possibility to move from pod to pod.

If Facebook’s users had the ability to retrieve their data and put them in a D* pod, without having to start all over again, maybe the would be more and more to come to us.
So to avoid some D* pods becoming new “FaceD*”/“D*book” we should in priority get that ability to move on…

That was long, and maybe not that clear. Sorry ^^. I hope I brought some thing to the debate.

5

Let’s say for example that some wealthy/greedy/shady company creates multiple D* pods which all accept tons of users. These pods could theoretically host the majority of the Diaspora users over time. Then, nothing would stop this greedy company to add some privacy invasive code on their own pods. Basically, what I am saying it that there would be a risk that the D* network gets contaminated by an important group of “bad citizens” (pods).

I’m not myself a hacktivist, but this would end up by those pods being hacked and ddosed for sure. No need to worry, no need for censorship in this respect.