Make allowlist less strict?

[Nutomic]

At the moment, the allowlist works in a relatively simple way: it blocks all users, communities, posts and comments from any instance which isn't in the allowlist. So if your instance has lemmy.ml in the allowlist and follows !lemmy_instances@lemmy.ml, you are actually never going to see any posts made by users on new-instance.com in that community, unless you already have that instance in your allowlist. This makes it more difficult to find new instances to federate with.

I think we should change this behaviour, so that all posts/comments in !lemmy_instances@lemmy.ml would be shown, regardless if the user's instance is in your allowlist or not. The idea is that you already trust lemmy.ml to moderate its communities well. Though if you have an instance in your blocklist, its content should be blocked in any case.

lemmy.ml is used as a placeholder, to simplify the explanation.

[dessalines]

I think I mostly agree with this, but chaining could very quickly become open federation. I'm not sure if this works now, but it might be nice to be able to use both the allowlist and blocklist at the same time, so that if you do want to disallow comments from users on instances down the chain, you can.

And just to clarify, is this only for users right?

[Nutomic]

You misunderstand, there is no chaining. Let me give a concrete example: We have instances alpha, beta and gamma. Alpha and beta federate via allowlist, beta and gamma as well. Alpha and gamma don't know each other, meaning they are neither in the allowlist nor in the blocklist. @user@alpha follows !main@beta. Now @user@gamma posts in !main@beta. In the current version of Lemmy, @user@alpha would not see this post, because gamm is not in the allowlist. I propose changing the behaviour so that post would be visible to @user@alpha. So alpha would be able to fetch user profiles, posts and comments from gamma, given that they appear in a community in beta. But communities from gamma would not federate to alpha,. Neither would any content from delta federate (an instance which only federates with gamma).

[dessalines]

That was what I was referring to by chaining, that @Alpha would see the post from @user@gamma even though its farther down the chain, and not explicitly in their allowlist.

So alpha would be able to fetch user profiles, posts and comments from gamma, given that they appear in a community in beta.

Wouldn't users be the only thing relevant here, since posts are done to a community then announced elsewhere. IE user gamma makes a post or comment to !main@beta, the only thing chained there is the user. The post or comment is already on beta, and announced to alpha.

[Nutomic]

At the moment any posts/comments in !main@beta made by @user@gamma are blocked by alpha. So users on alpha wont see them, this is what I propose to change.