Fediseer

To support people being ably to verify the reasons for censures, the fediseer now allows you to submit evidence along with the reasons for a censure. We provide up to 1000 chars to write whatever you want, but the suggested use is posting URLs, preferrably to a domain you control which contain further links and screenshots.

Example evidence link that I am using: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/3906719

You can use this as an RSS feed to see what recent changes have happened on fediseer recently. It also supports filtering per source/target domain, or activity type.

It doesn't contain any changes before now though.

@rikudou@lemmings.world has been very kind to build a new GUI from scratch and make it easily hostable. So I've done just that and deployed a version that I control under gui.fediseer.com

After I saw this post from beehaw.org,and this post about mastodon I thought of this feature to allow instance administrators to report how many sysadmins and how many moderators they have on staff for their instance.

The idea is that one can use this information to see if any instances are struggling to maintain themselves based on their size. For example, an instance of 10K users like lemmy.dbzer0.com would not be manageable without extra support.

Why these two roles specifically? because in my experience, these are the most important ones for a fediverse instance to have and it's unlikely the owner of the instance is good enough to do both at the same time. For example, I'm a great sysadmin, but I suck at moderation duties.

Both of these skills tend to be OK to leave to one person if an instance is small (say, below 1000 users), where the owner can get away with relying on searchable docker commands and and built-in moderation tools. However above that number, an inexperienced owner at one or both of these will find themselves in trouble.

This information starts as null for each claimed or guaranteed instance on the fediseer, which effectively means "unknown". Instance admins who have claimed their instances can then use the PATCH option on the /api/v1/whitelist endpoint to specify how many sysadmins and/or moderators they currently have.

curl -X 'PATCH' \
  'https://fediseer.com/api/v1/whitelist/lemmy.dbzer0.com' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'apikey: YOUR_KEY_HERE' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "sysadmins": 1,
  "moderators": 3
}'

Yes, one can also see how many "admins" an instance has from their public info, but a lot of fediverse software do not provide the full picture. For example mastodon only shows one admin, whereas lemmy admins have no distinction between the two. So you could see a lemmy instance with 4 admins, of which they're all moderators, and they have no experience sysadmin on staff.

My hope is that this information can then be used to find instances where people can volunteer support, and also be used by tools suggesting new instances to promote instances with good staff health.

You can now specify extra domains to pull into your censures. You can also specify only specific reasons to censure (for example, censure only loli and csam). Finally you can now also specify the min_censures to use to add to your list.

For example you might want to use 10 different instances as your trusted censure reference, but only block instances censured by at least 5 of them

Fediseer has been updated to allow filtering on /api/v1/censures_given on reasons and amount of censures. it also reports amount of censures per domain

This allows you to use it as a join OR as an intersect, OR as a percentage based.

The below url, will perform an intesection on the censures given by 3 different reference instances:

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/censures_given/lemmy.dbzer0.com%2Cprogramming.dev%2Clemmings.world?min_censures=3

The below will filter only domains which at least one of the reference instances has censured them for "loli"

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/censures_given/lemmy.dbzer0.com%2Cprogramming.dev%2Clemmings.world?reasons_csv=loli

You can combine these two filters as well

The below will return only domains where at least 2 of the reference instances have marked them as "loli"

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/censures_given/lemmy.dbzer0.com%2Cprogramming.dev%2Clemmings.world?min_censures=2&amp%3Breasons_csv=loli

I've created a Fediseer frontend that's easy to use!

URL: https://fediseer.lemmings.world/ Source: https://github.com/RikudouSage/FediseerGUI

@fediseer Fediseer can now censure wildcard domains

You can now censure an a wildcard domain on #fediseer which can be useful for ingesting your censures intto a blocklist for problematic domains who are playing games.

#fediblockmeta

I noticed a PM reply to the fediseer from an endorsed instance admin (@stefan@gardenstate.social) telling us they didn't understand what that PM means.

So I set about writing an FAQ which would allow me to link to it as part of the PMs I'm sending to the various admins.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any more questions you'd like me to address, please post them here.

Fediseer is still a bit of a PITA to use as it requires you use a clunk API interface or API commands. Fortunately @xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com has stepped up to start developing a nicer frontend to use for doing standard operations such as guarantees and endorsements.

The GUI is still basic but functional and it's improving daily.

New feature has been deployed on the Fediseer where it can autogenerate special .svg badges for your Fediverse domain which you can embed directly.

The images have an embedded link to the endpoints proving this, but that doesn't work in markdown, so when embedding in markdown, you need to put the link manually.

Guarantees

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/badges/guarantees/%7Bdomain%7D.svg

This badge will display which other fediverse domain guaranteed that your domain is not spam. Remember each instance can only have 1 guarantor due to the chain of trust.

Example:

[![](http://fediseer.com/api/v1/badges/guarantees/lemmy.dbzer0.com.svg)](https://fediseer.com/api/v1/whitelist/lemmy.dbzer0.com)`

Endorsements

https://fediseer.com/api/v1/badges/endorsements/%7Bdomain%7D.svg

This badge will provide a count of how many other fediverse domains endorsed for yours. An instance can guarantee another instance for any reason.

Example:

[![](http://fediseer.com/api/v1/badges/endorsements/lemmy.dbzer0.com.svg)](https://fediseer.com/api/v1/endorsements/lemmy.dbzer0.com)`

Display

You can place these anywhere you want on your site, but obvious suggestion is on the main sidebar. This will work for any domain known by the Fediseer. If your domain is not known, simply claim it and then find someone to guarantee for you.

What this means is that Friendica admins will now get PMs on guarantees etc.

Note that while every software can be added, guaranteed, only the supported software get PMs.

Join for Real Time discussions

• If you've claimed your instance, you can now search for it via your API key. This should be useful for GUI developers.
• You can see how many admins have claimed an instance
• update_blacklist.py has been updated when RequireApplication is switched on in 0.18
• The sus list has been updated to take into account and report users per active user

Also, @xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com has started working on a new UI, so hopefully soon it'll be much easier to claim and guarantee your instances!

if you think the idea of the Fediseer is a good one, we could use your help!

If you have an instance, make sure you've claimed it. To claim it, you can use this curl command

DOMAIN=lemmy.dbzer0.com
ADMIN=db0
curl -X 'PUT' \
  'https://fediseer.com/api/v1/whitelist/$%7BDOMAIN%7D' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Client-Agent: unknown:0:unknown' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "admin": "${ADMIN}"
}'

In the above bash script, simple replace your DOMAIN and ADMIN with your own. If you're on windows, you can use git bash to run it.

Now you simply need to wait for someone to guarantee your instance. You can ask in this thread, or just look for other guaranteed instances which share your values and ask them. In fact if you pass a "guarantor": "domain.tld" key/value to the payload above, the admins of that instance will get a PM to guarantee for you!

Once you get your API key with a PM, you can then help us add more instance. If you know of any instances that are definitelly not spam, simply use the nelow curl call to guarantee for them as your own instance. They don't have to be claimed yet.

APIKEY="abcdefsawadf"
DOMAIN="notspam.domain.tld"
curl -X 'PUT' \
  'https://fediseer.com/api/v1/guarantees/$%7BDOMAIN%7D' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'apikey: ${APIKEY}'

Alternatively you can use the API directly so you don't have to edit curl commands.

I hope soon we'll have a working GUI which will make this very painless.

That software can be added to the Fediseer and guaranteed or endorsed by other instances, but cannot be claimed by its admins. This is because I have not figured out how to retrieve the admin list and/or private message people there.

Currently only Mastodon and Lemmy are supported for claiming.

I have updated the content of this devlog to match the current workflow of the API, with the streamlined registration and claims