Opt out?

[snarfed]

Hi @gugray! RSS Parrot is great, I love seeing this kind of work in the fediverse. Congrats on launching it!

I run a similar service, https://fed.brid.gy/, and one of its features that I've already used a handful of times is opt out, ie letting people ask to prevent my service from bridging their sites or accounts. Just curious, have you considered that for RSS Parrot yet?

[gugray]

Hi! First of all, congrats on Bridgy Fed! I wish I had known about it back in December, it may well have spared me the work I put into building the Parrot :D

I have definitely been working towards opt-out. It's related to moderation: in both cases the goal is to block feeds from getting relayed, but for different reasons.

Right now opt-out works in an informal way. My email is easily discoverable on the About page, and if someone drops me a message with a compelling reason, I'll remove an existing account and add it to the block list so it doesn't come back.

The hard part about this is to verify I'm really talking to the person who controls a feed, and not a random stranger who doesn't like something on the internet. So far it's been reasonably clear that the request is real by checking the website.

I'm not optimistic that a more technical form of verification would broadly work in practice. (I.e., I don't expect that the vast majority of people publishing something on the internet have the means to add a .well-known file to the site or a custom header to the RSS feed.) So for now I'm sticking with the informal method. What are your experiences in this regard?

[snarfed]

Thanks for the kind words! I'm all for plurality, I love that RSS Parrot exists even if Bridgy Fed does too. 😁

Handling opt outs manually like you're currently doing makes perfect sense. I do it in BF too. You might want to consider mentioning in the docs that you're happy to let people to opt out, and all they need to do is email you.

You're right that headers and .well-known files aren't very accessible. Fortunately most web servers and even social networks let you enter "about" or profile text that's rendered on your home page or profile, often inside microformats or metaformats that make it easy to extract. Bridgy Fed looks for #nobridge in that text and interprets it as an opt out.

[gugray]

Ah, at first I didn't get it, now I understand how #nobridge works. This makes a lot of sense. I also like the CTA about opting out on the page of the feed/account, even if it simply says "drop me an email at [...]". I'll add this.

[gugray]

As a first step I've added a remark to the browser page of every feed saying the owner can have it removed by emailing the parrot.