Pie in the sky: Confederation Management Interface
I would very much like to be able to build some more powerful (semi-)centralized tooling for the League, and to do that, I think we need to expose more details than are currently made available from GoToSocial and, as far as I know, from Akkoma as well.
In particular, I'd like both to provide an API specifically for confederation tools to manage, configured per-instance with an operator-selected secret which can then be given to the League to use in centralized tooling.
I'd like this API to provide, at minimum:
A read-only list of users on the instance, including who has mod and admin powers
A read-only list of allowed and blocked instances
A "firehose" post feed (just post URIs, doesn't need to have the post bodies or anything)
A way to read followers-only posts (not DMs/private mentions) without following the user
Again, this is meant to be available only to authorized League tooling, not to individuals or anyone outside the league.
The goal is to hook these up to a centralized service that can:
Notify the rest of the League if someone allowlists a non-League server
Notify admins when their allowlist is out of date
Allow some monitoring of who is on the League and how quickly we are growing
Possibly notify the League if supposedly non-open-signup servers are getting new users
Finally, the real pie in the sky: having a bot that can read posts and auto-report them to their instances if they break rules or, more importantly, are improperly formatted or causing federation problems. Basically a sort of moderation and admin failsafe that we can fall back to in the case of federation issues.
Any of these would be valuable by themselves, but all together they would really allow us to step up our coordination and moderation game. I'm curious about others' thoughts.
nora Sun 6 Oct 2024 4:10PM
@Tenna Yeah, agreed - though I think it'd be more useful (and easier) to just have an API endpoint that allows dumping the config (without secrets) so our centralized tooling can verify compliance
ruby Sun 6 Oct 2024 10:20PM
I feel like a lot of this stuff would make the life of wl-spanner easier, if not possible at all. Definitely an avenue worth pursuing IMO
walking mirage Mon 7 Oct 2024 6:47PM
All of these strike me as very good ideas.
kouhai Fri 11 Oct 2024 6:56AM
Yeah, this sounds reasonable to put on our roadmap.
nora Sun 27 Oct 2024 2:19AM
Worth noting that GoToSocial upstream is implementing allow/blocklist subscriptions ahead of us. https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@dumpsterqueer/statuses/01JAWVD8E2QG7RF2Z0D42S70QA
Tenna · Sun 6 Oct 2024 3:56PM
There is one endpoint I’ve thought would be useful, and thought about trying to implement myself at least in Akkoma - an endpoint that checks the instance config to see if it conforms to Website League requirements and, if not, where it’s failing.