Hi there - I’am still lacking of a full understanding of how public posts are spread.
I have setup a pod for testing purposes. I log in (as podmin / moderator) and I see in ‘public stream’ posts of people not member of my pod, and posts not tagged with anything I follow.
Why do I see foreign public posts in ‘my’ stream?
The ‘public’ stream contains everything received by your pod. This is accessed via the url https://podname.tld/public
‘Your’ stream contains posts from people you are sharing with plus public posts containing tags you follow. This is accessed via the url https://podname.tld/stream
Understand… If the “public” stream will hold every post made by foreign pods and users, is there any chance to take control over it, what ‘my’ pod will reached?
Is there a pod-wide ignore by pod or ignore user?
About why your pod receives some posts of the whole network, but not all, I wrote this 8 years ago (damn) and it’s still mainly accurate: http://geexxx.fr/2013/07/23/comment-ca-marche-la-federation-de-diaspora/#english
About a global ban (to an external user or pod), there is no official mechanism in diaspora* to do so. A hack could be to replace the pub key of the unwanted external users in the DB, that would make diaspora* drops their messages automatically. But this probably shouldn’t be done…
A naive view:
the pods table has a “blocked” column. But I don’t see this is implemented anywhere in pods.rb.
May this a low-hanging fruit to make a “block pod” switch in the admin setting? Just connecting the blocked status with the offline check?
By the way: Thanks for linking to your article - did you intent to write a book? Good work, I’ve read (most of it).