A lot of new features have been added to the Fediseer today.

First is the addition of Hesitations. They are functionally identical to censures but are meant to represent something more akin to “distrust” rather than outright disapproval. The aim is that you can use these to mark instances towards which you would like to be more cautious. How you implement this cautiousness is up to you and your software.

For example, in Mastodon you could set all instances you doubt as “Silenced”. Or you could reject all images coming from them. If you have the dev chops, you could try mark them in your UI somehow. Or admin tools could mark them for review by mods.

Like censures, you can mix and match hesitations of multiple instances together and filter by reasons and min_hesitations.

The second feature is the PM proxy. I have just created the account @fediseer@botsin.space which can be used to PM instances instead of @fediseer@fediseer.com. While the built-in fediseer messaging works well, it’s a lot of development to figure out how to make with every new APub software coming out.

So as to allow many more instance admins to join the fediseer, they can switch the pm_proxy key when registering to ‘MASTODON’ from none. This will make fediseer PM their API key via the @fediseer@botsin.space account.

If you plan to follow this approach, ensure that botsin.space is not blocked by your instance and I would suggest you follow @fediseer@botsin.space in advance, to ensure you receive the API key PM

Likewise admins who have claimed their instance can switch the pm_proxy to ‘MASTODON’ or ‘NONE’ permanently in the same place they would reset their API key. But be aware that when you do this, fediseer will PM all admins of that instance via both new and old proxy, to ensure that they are aware.

With this update, I’m no longer rejecting software except Mastodon, Lemmy and Friendica. Now admins of Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks like Firefish can claim their instances as well!

Another thing added is meta reasons. You can now specify __all_bigots__ or __all_pedos__ in your censure reasons, and it will ensure that it filters in all variations of those reasons. For example, __all_bigots__ will add into your reasons “racism, sexism, transphobia, bigotry” and the like.

Finally, Endorsements can now also have reasons, and likewise now also support the same type of filtering as censures. This was from a suggestion from someone who was considering using endorsements as an allow-list. The reasons then would enable other instances using endorsements for allow-list to better be able to filter who to allow.