from Hacker News

FSE meets the FBI

by 1337p337 on 6/9/25, 1:59 AM with 146 comments

• by DoctorOW on 6/9/25, 9:14 AM

  > I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever

  Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.

• by perching_aix on 6/9/25, 9:52 AM

  I really liked how the story starts with not wanting to introduce captcha because it hurts real users, then continues to spend the next 80% of it covering how open registrations and the public timeline were down for however long, extremely negatively impacting users.

  Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.

• by roenxi on 6/9/25, 3:28 AM

  There is really quite a lot to like about this post:

  1) Gentleman is doing citizen science figuring out a small part of the FBI's intelligence gathering/spying apparatus.

  2) Random Fediverse drama tidbits.

  3) Interesting sysadmin tactics for small server operators.

  4) This torswats fellow sounds like a piece of work and gets arrested which adds an interesting subplot.

  5) Seems like quite an intelligent writer, I just like the style.

  5 stars. Well worth reading.

• by Reventlov on 6/9/25, 7:16 AM

  >I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever, giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed.

  Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.

• by underyx on 6/9/25, 7:50 AM

  Great read. I have a tiny, inconsequential, possibly wrong correction. You had assumed that the “Negative” word on the internal search engine screenshot was sentiment analysis. I think it was instead a button to report the post in the internal system as a “negative” result as in, not actually matching the search they were trying to do. Sentiment analysis doesn’t seem like it would be very useful in this scenario.

• by mkfs on 6/9/25, 11:08 AM

  > Pedophiles were showing up on FSE.

  That seems to be a problem with the Fediverse in general. And admittedly, Discord.

• by CaptainFever on 6/10/25, 11:26 AM

  Interesting to see that this is kicked off by the referal header. Seems like a privacy issue to have your browser tell servers part of your browsing history by default.

  IIRC, Tor doesn't have that issue.

• by TheonlyJem on 6/9/25, 6:44 AM

  That was a lot

• by norswap on 6/9/25, 8:54 PM

  Wasn't there a better technical way to block the scraper? Like blocking IPs/domains at ingress instead of serving requests? Probably you do still pay for request traffic though...

  Isn't there a market for anti-DDOS third-party services for API endpoints (Cloudflare etc) — through probably for "Free Speech Extremist" that wouldn't be suitable solution, and there are charges too (though presumably when facing a situation like this you actually save money).

• by FilosofumRex on 6/9/25, 4:27 AM

  FSE {free speech extremists}, why would one have to be an extremist in country where free speech is enshrined in its Constitutional Law.

• by hello_computer on 6/9/25, 9:51 AM

  are there any good open-source porn-detector models out there? if i ran an image board in 2025, that would be job #1, since it’s really just a weapon, and we don’t speak or print with our genitals—well, most of us anyway…

• by slt2021 on 6/9/25, 3:58 AM

  sorry to be this person, but can anyone TLDR this for me?

• by blu3h4t on 6/9/25, 6:20 AM

  I read it as fsf meets the fbi :D

• by axus on 6/9/25, 7:05 PM

  FBI paying a front group (BoardReader?) to collect open source intelligence isn't too weird, doesn't sound like a crime. And I'm happy the FBI spent resources going after "swatting".

  I'd really like to know how the front group are controlling Facebook servers to collect data.