Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
And the statement that it wasn’t encrypted, just compressed, is an entirely antagonistic reframing.
There were multiple block lists. Some right in the open, and one that was stored as a monolithic .dat (I assume the one he called “compressed”).
The end result is that the second list was obfuscated from not only end-users, but also “admins” hosting it, and developers attempting to work on the project.
The compression decision only holds if all of the filter lists were compressed and this decision was clearly documented.
Plus the circumstantial evidence that the “enable toxic mode” option did not in fact disable the filtering that relied on the .dat file.
I can’t even say that I’m in theory against his openly stated goals of making the fediverse more approachable to normies. But this is not the way to implement it, and it’s not the way to react when called out about it.
If you want something approachable for normies, Facebook is right there.
IMO, the fediverse should be weird and stay weird. It doesn’t need to grow huge, it doesn’t need to become a normie website or a household name.