I was one of the trailblazers who defeded from .ml and once the domain filtering feature was added, I added lemmy.ml to my domain blocks in the admin panel. Reason being, I don’t want .ml content including crossposts and re-posted images.
I thought that was working great until I noticed today that I hadn’t gotten any posts to !books@lemmy.world for several months. Even trying to manually resolve a post pulled from there directly, it wouldn’t load. Finally checked the server logs, and there was a Domain is blocked event right after the logged call to ResolveObject. Of course the logs didn’t say what domain.
Long story short, after scouring the randomly-selected test post to see if there was some kind of false positive, I finally realize there’s a “Related Community” link to a community on .ml in c/Books’s community description and that was what it was hitting on. Any post coming in to c/Books was being rejected because the community description linked to something in my site’s URL filters.
So, can’t even speak about a given community (just because they live in a certain instance) without getting blocked? Well now that’s censorship if I’ve ever seen any.
Tbf, this behavior is very much unintentional, as OP explicitly lays out, and would like to make others aware and stop it from happening.
Also, an individual user can “speak about” an instance just fine without getting thus censured - it’s only community sidebar descriptions being caught up in this sweep unintentionally.
So yeah, OP himself shares your distaste that this is a bad thing? But it is not a thousandth as bad as you are making it out to be - which given recent flamewars about Tankies vs. PieFed I wanted to make things crystal clear even if you meant every word there in jest, so that others do not get mislead.
Hmm it’s fortunate that this only applies to the sidebars, but that also makes me highly question that it is
given it happens only there and not everywhere.
I unfortunately have worked with programming filters before (paid for it; still not worth it). The first thing you test about a filter in a development environment is that it filters out what you want. The second thing you test about a filter in a development environment is that it does not filter out what you don’t want. All that comes long before pushing to production (let alone on a Friday). That sounds like at least negligence, so it’s debatable if it’s actually unintentional.
Regarding an issue filed for this… well, issue, I can’t find any. Can’t file one either, since I don’t use a Microslop account anylonger. Kudos to whoever files the issue.