With the advent of FediCheck, there will be big changes to the Oliphant blocklists in the future.

I've always said the list project I'm doing is an "interim step on the road to something better."

FediCheck is the "something better", at least so far as what I can contribute.

In particular, it will let an admin subscribe to a list and push blocks to their server and also--importantly--it natively handles retractions. This has been, by far, one of the hardest problems to solve for any blocklist maintainer.

So--good news--it can also remove blocks from your server, so long as it added those blocks to your server in the first place.

Additionally, FediCheck has an element of human review in the blocklist process, ensuring that every domain on the list isn't going to show up by "surprise" and will be vetted by real humans at IFTAS before being approved and released as a block to get pushed to other servers.

While I don't want to completely archive the repo (though some have recommended as much), for those who might have scripted pulls to the .csv files created, I am planning to change the repo to become a blocklist aggregator--or specifically that is to say, I'll be aggregating other people's lists, I will no longer be making my own.

The Unified Tier 0 Oliphant List is very close to that today:

It's a list that combines Seirdy's Tier 0, Gardenfence, and my 'council' (80% consensus) into a 'unified' tier 0, and I think that's the most popular list of all.

So the idea is to combine Seirdy's Tier 0, Gardenfence, and the IFTAS DNI list together into a single 'unified tier 0' or 'min' file--

And then delete every other file and algorithm from the repo.

Yes, that means getting rid of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3, all council sources, and using the blog entries that currently are up there to help direct people to other blocklist projects.

While I greatly appreciate the work of the 'council' thus far, they are already involved in other projects and I don't have the connection to the various parties involved like I used to. Rather than have the list slowly become less and less useful because I'm unable to get more contributors, I think I should instead migrate the list to a more honest interim state--an aggregator of other people's blocklists.

I realize this might upset some of you, and I apologize for that. You should still be able to use the Tier 0 Oliphant list and get a respectable list of blocks, though you'll notice certain more contentious entries like qoto and threads won't be on that list anymore...just a natural consequence of losing the 80% consensus 'council' list as a contributor.

If you don't want to seek out other blocklist projects, and simply want a single unified list that combines all of those blocklist sources into one? That will be the new Oliphant list.

And if you want to build a list yourself, I've got detailed instructions on how to generate consensus blocklists using Fediblockhole.

As of right now:

• All automated updates of the Oliphant blocklists are paused until I make the necessary changes to remove the 'council' sources and trim down the list of available files for download
• All automated pushes I've been doing to remote servers have ceased. This is in preparation for the release of FediCheck, which will allow for a much simpler subscription process going forward.

If you have any questions about this, come see me. I'll have a larger blog post about this later, but I wanted to let the larger fedi know about this before I proceed.

Stay tuned, and the most sincerest of thanks to everyone who has contributed to this project thus far.

#Oliphant #blocklist