@GossiTheDog I think @timbray might be interested in that too.

@Tutanota The question is always "Safe for who?".

@MicroSFF Yep.

"Good. I'm looking for a partner. Interested?"

@inthehands Much like the Pinkerton Detective Agency, including the backing of the government. We know how that ended, and that it took the public rising up and not just resisting but replacing the politicians who supported what was happening. I'm hoping that in '26 we'll see the first wave of that.

@bloor Audiophool-grade cables.

@HunterZ @neil Did I say anything about it being at the instance level? No, I did not.

The use cases all involve decisions by individual users about which blocklists to subscribe to. It certainly _could_ be used by an instance admin, but we already give them that power by allowing instance-level blocking in the first place. The social issue there isn't subscribeable blocklilsts, it's having an instance admin you can't trust not to block people inappropriately by whatever mechanism.

@HunterZ @neil Email RBLs and browser ad blockers are vulnerable to the same abuses. If we adopted your policy, both would be abandoned. Nobody's stupid enough to propose that, though.

... OK, Google is stupid enough to propose doing away with ad blockers, but look how well that idea was received.

@HunterZ @neil Subscribeable blocklists are a technical issue, and I can state a number of good use cases for them.

Abuse of a blocklist by it's creator (misleading subscribers about criteria, doing a bait-and-switch after getting a subscriber base) is completely separate, and yes _that's_ a social issue. Hence my concern for categorization and ratings, and ways to prevent those from being abused to give a list a false reputation.

@neil I'm still looking at what's involved in creating subscribeable blocklists. The basic hook into the block functionality on the server is obvious enough, but the list itself involves learning everything about the ActivityPub protocol and the federation and syndication models. Making it useful involves having categorization and user ratings while preventing abuse of them too. Straightforward in concept, terminally hirsute in implementation.

@neil Huh. I thought there was a separate one for replies to your post, not your replies. Sorry, apparently I was wrong.

I also don't see anything for limiting visibiility to only those you follow, only to followers. There's an option whether or not to auto-approve followers, you can turn that off to give you control over who can follow you. That seems to be as far as it goes.

Going to add my voice to the requests for more reply privacy options.

@neil In account settings there's a followers-only option for reply privacy. That's probably what you want.