from Hacker News

Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

by zach43 on 5/5/19, 3:45 PM with 85 comments

• by lifthrasiir on 5/5/19, 7:32 PM

  There is a Ruby port [1] publicly available. From the encoding routine [2], it seems to be an sRGB correction followed by a two-dimensional DCT. The first two bytes encode parameters---the size of the output matrix n x m and the quantization scale used for ACs; next 4 bytes encode the DC, then (nm-1) quantized ACs (2 bytes per AC) follow. The comparison to Facebook's similar solution [3] would be interesting (but I realize that Blurhash tries to hide explicit images, so technically they have different goals).

  [1] https://github.com/Gargron/blurhash/

  [2] https://github.com/Gargron/blurhash/blob/master/ext/blurhash...

  [3] https://code.fb.com/android/the-technology-behind-preview-ph...

• by BlackLotus89 on 5/5/19, 7:35 PM

  Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064

  I normally hate this kind of blur and I'm not sure if this is worth such a big release note. I normally see such filters applied (forced on users by platform conventions), requiring a login to "unlock" and often you find yourself wondering why it was blocked in the first place....

  Could be good to hide spoilers thought

• by leshokunin on 5/5/19, 11:53 PM

  How does Mastodon handle governance for content that gets reported? It sounds like a logistics nightmare. It's nice that the apps are getting a way to blur things, but I would imagine that the bigger problem would be bad actors running instances, and finding ways to keep them away.

• by _4ziu on 5/5/19, 8:21 PM

  I really like the idea of Mastodon, but i can't shake this feeling that their name is kind of awful. I get that they're not trying to be exactly like twitter but by comparison, twitter is a much bubblier and friendlier word.

• by coldacid on 5/6/19, 9:18 PM

  Now if only certain instances would actually default to marking all their content as adult content. This is great to have but useless when certain 18+ instances just bare all kinds of smut clear to the timeline. (I'm talking mainly of the *blr instances, in case you haven't already hidden them for yourselves.)

• by barbs on 5/5/19, 10:17 PM

  I feel like "BlurHash" is a misleading name, since it's not a hash of the image data that gets created, it's just highly compressed to just some data about the colours used. Unless I'm misunderstanding something?