Nah it should not. It would hurt decentralization and small instances. We already have a tool for curbing spam, it’s called the Fediseer. You may or may not have heard about it, but most admins have.

In Italian and French they are caled “Vasistas”, from the German “Was ist das?” (What’s that?), it’s said they called it that way because the first German tourists who saw those windows in France were confused and kept asking for clarifications on how they worked.

I’m sorry could you please elaborate on why the rest of the Fediverse would be enraged, or how this could be used for harassment? I don’t think I follow. I’ll admit, I only interact with the Fediverse through Lemmy so maybe there’s some dynamics of the Masto-sphere I’m not picking up.

My understanding is that Mastodon admins can choose to hide their /domain_blocks endpoint to either outside users or even to all non admins. (source), and as a matter of fact almost a thousand of the 1700 Mastodon instances I’m querying already do so, so really I can only get the federation status of the few hundred that remain.

I think the admins that prefer not to show their defeds, in fear of harassment, are already hiding them, so it should be ok for me to query the remaining ones.

Yeah sure. Assuming you are only targeting Lemmy instances (other softwares make this a bit more complicated), A “can interact” with B if:

• A hasn’t blocked B
• B hasn’t blocked A
• Neither A nor B are on allowlist. If either is on allowlist, it must have explicitly added the other one to its allow list (this is very uncommon, the only big instance using allow lists is hexbear.net)

So, to verify this, you could query the Defed Investigator with the instances you care about, one at a time. Only select the softwares you care about (likely only Lemmy) to make the query faster. Say you wanted to verify the compatibility between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works (just making an example). Go to https://defed.xyz/check?name=sh.itjust.works&software=lemmy

• ✔ lemmy.world doesn’t appear in the “Instances defederated from sh.itjust.works” (this means .world hasn’t blocked SJW)
• ✔ lemmy.world doesn’t appear in the “Instances defederated by sh.itjust.works” (this means SJW hasn’t blocked .world)
• ✔ lemmy.world doesn’t appear among the “Instances not allowing sh.itjust.works” (this means .world isn’t on allowlist or, if it is, it has explicitly allowed SJW. Again, this is very uncommon)

Also make sure the instance you are looking for isn’t among the “Instances that returned errors”, of course.

Like @iso@lemy.lol said, can’t query from the backend if there is no backend :)

It’s all serverless, so this is as good as it gets.