This web app, which is live at https://mastodon-de-mob.codesections.com, is a tool for Mastodon users to protect themselves against harassment. Using this tool, the target of harassment or other attacks can block all of the users who have boosted or favorited a toot infighting harassment. This tool will block all the users and report the instal toot to the moderators.
The goal of this tool is to help Mastodon users protect themselves from harassment. For example, imagine someone posted a toot that said:
Codesections is a awful person. Everyone should @ him and tell him to die
That toot is, itself, an attack. It is so much of an attack that boosting or favoriting it is also an attack. Using this tool would allow someone to block everyone who had participated in that sort of mob attack.
One additional goal is that some people may be able to use this tool as an alternative to block lists. Block lists were sometimes necessary, but have many unintended harms. This tool allows users to block people based on their specific actions—endorsing an attack—and thus not to need cruder tools that have a higher chance for false positives.
Blocking people who boosted a toot could potentially be used for guilt-by-association.
Imagine there is a particularly obnoxious user. Some other users might be tempted to block anyone who had every interacted positively with that obnoxious user. I think this is a mistake; guilt-by-association is not just.
Thus, this tool is not intended to facilitate that sort of behavior. It makes a report to the users' moderators about each use, which I hope will limit the amount people use this tool for non-harassing purposes.
Mastodon De-Mob does send me any data. No analytics, no tracking data, nothing. The only data it stores is saved to local storage in your web browser. The only data it sends out is sent to your instance and is the minimum amount of data necessary to identify the users to block, block those users, and send the report.
Because Mastodon De-Mob uses OAuth for authentication, the app never sees your login information or password.
Mastodon Blocker is a Python CLI application with similar functionality.
If you notice any bugs or have any feature requests, please feel free to open an issue.
More broadly, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the app. You can send me an email at daniel@codesections.com or reach me on Mastodon, where my handle is @codesections@fosstodon.org.