FSE meets the FBI

Overall reaction to the post

• Many found it an excellent, entertaining writeup: part “citizen science” on FBI tooling, part fediverse drama, part sysadmin war story, with a strong narrative style.
• Several said it would make a good conference talk and praised the technical detail about small-server operations and blocking scrapers.
• Others remarked it reinforced their desire not to host public communities due to the moderation and abuse burden.

How serious was the online threat?

• One camp: the quoted “Witch King” threat is obviously absurd/jokey and not a credible indicator of intent, even if the same person later did serious crimes. Treating such posts as serious is seen as overreach and bad for civil liberties.
• Opposing camp: you can’t reliably distinguish real from fake threats from text alone; law enforcement must treat almost all as potentially serious. Threats can be crimes on their own, even if unlikely to be carried out.
• Some argue the author’s initial dismissal of the threat shows a dangerous bias, especially given the eventual discovery of a broader harassment/swatting campaign.

FBI scraping, legality, and rights

• General agreement that FBI paying third parties to scrape public data and feed it into internal tools is unsurprising; the “Facebook-like” interface was of technical interest.
• Concerns raised about:
  • Possible Fourth Amendment/CFAA issues if agents bypassed technical access controls.
  • Outsourcing to foreign companies that might be breaking U.S. law on the Bureau’s behalf.
• Disagreement about whether this story shows First Amendment violations (most note no content was removed or speech compelled).

Free speech “extremism” and moderation

• “Free Speech Extremist” is widely read as tongue‑in‑cheek but sparks debate over how free U.S. speech actually is (e.g., anti‑BDS laws, Citizens United, contested obscenity).
• Some emphasize that private blocking/defederation is not censorship but an exercise of their own freedom of association.
• Others complain instance-level blocking limits their ability to follow diverse people; suggestions include self‑hosting to bypass others’ moderation choices.
• Several admins describe blocking FSE not because of fediblock lists but due to direct racist/abusive behavior and lack of enforcement there.

Technical and operational notes

• Discussion of:
  • Blocking scrapers by IP vs dealing with rotating residential proxies.
  • Referer headers leaking browsing history; mention of referrer-policy and Tor’s behavior.
  • Whether a “Negative” label in the FBI UI means sentiment analysis or “bad search result.”
• Side threads on the difficulty of filtering porn/illegal images and the prevalence of abusive/illegal content across open platforms (fediverse, Discord, Signal, etc.).