Fediverse

PieFed let you follow/block keywords, but that’s not the same as robust, community-wide topic blocking. Imagine collaborative, booru-style tagging across posts so blocking a tag reliably removes all content using it.

This would require a fediverse platform that has a built-in, accurate tagging system. So no under that basis.

Here's hoping keyword blocking hits Lemmy/my instance is able to facilitate its planned switch to PieFed without a hitch in the future. I used that feature extensively on Reddit (with RES) to great success and with minimal effort.

However, I'm not a fan of crowdsourced tagging. Topic tagging is significantly more subjective than e.g. the functionality provided by crowdsourced extensions like SponsorBlock.

I feel that crowdsourced tagging will likely reduce/fragment engagement if shared blocklists become widely adopted. I can easily imagine somebody tagging something inappropriately to soft-censor certain posts to groups of users... there are many scenarios that this could be abused if improperly designed or implemented.

There is an argument to made towards making post/community-level flairs a thing and allowing blocking from that. There could also be basic/broad meta-level flairs (e.g. Photo, Video, Meme, Discussion, etc.) that could also be used to filter content.

Keyword blocking works on piefed. As long as people add image descriptions, it works well even on the meme communities.

I don't feel something like crowdsourced tagging would work for the Fediverse unless it has some sort of approval system built for either post's author or commuity admins (and those are already busy). Otherwise it would be far too easy to do things like brigading, or pushing government-style "self-censorship" (or straight out censorship of others: just get an army of ~~bots~~ "volunteers" into one instance, let the resulting blocks federate). Something closer to AO3 style tagging, where the author retains most control but readers can add tags to things that are valid only to them (and maybe to people they share data with too?) should workbetter IMO.

Blocking keywords is not reliable to block topics because a keyword does not a topic make, for example in this post I mention queer, socialism, musk and islam yet it's not topical to any of those things.

Mmm not sure how it will be managed. It depends whom you trust.

On our jlai.lu chat (https://jlailu.zulipchat.com/) we have a section that has a list of keyword to remove all post related to MAGA and far right. It gives us a peace of mind and we can purpose our keywords.

Imho, you may suggest a git, put your blocklist and invit some people to edit it. Honnestly, i think it is safer to handle personnaly because you know what's inside. But i may be wrong

That would be easier implemented with microblogging tagging, and the only thread-based platform that uses tags is Mbin afaik. However, even in it you can't still block tags. Maybe poke the devs of Mbin to implement it?

Piefed does this. haven't seen any posts about Elon Musk in awhile.

This would require a whole lot of discipline, namely the discipline of everyone always adding all appropriate tags to their content. In a Fediverse which most people use like Twitter/a Threadiverse which most people use like Reddit where there simply are no such tags.

Even if there was a *booru clone in the Fediverse, you'd still have shit-tons of people who upload their stuff with literally zero tags whatsoever because they can't be bothered. Just like on every last already existing booru.

No-one is willing to build Fediverse software upon discipline as a requirement.

Does anyone know of software that already provides topic-level blocking out of the box without needing long manual lists?

yep, reddit, facebook, twitter...