Protecting Your Mastodon Instance with rapidblock

Stephen Schwetz -

The RapidBlock Project is a grassroots initiative to make Fediverse domain blocking more effective through collective action.

Moderation on the Fediverse is unevenly distributed. Some instance admins devotedly follow the #FediBlock hashtag, blocking abusive servers within hours of their first appearance on the network. Others wait until their own users file a report. Still others do nothing at all.

Installation

Installation with an debian based Linux distribution is as easy as running

 curl -s https://apt.rapidblock.org/install.sh | sudo bash

This will run through installing the apt repository, pulling the required packages, and installing them.

Configuration

Configuration for the toolset is fairly simple and is done through a text file located at /etc/default/rapidblock by default the file looks like the below:

 # vim:set ft=sh:
 #
 # This file contains the configuration settings for the RapidBlock cron script.
 #
 # In source control, this file lives at:Ω #   https://github.com/rapidblock-org/rapidblock/blob/main/dist/cron.default
 #
 # When installed via a package manager, this file lives at:
 #   /etc/default/rapidblock
 #
 # The crontab file lives at:
 #   /etc/cron.d/rapidblock
 #
 # The script itself lives at:
 #   /opt/rapidblock/scripts/cron.sh
 ​
 ENABLED=0
 SLEEP_MIN=0
 SLEEP_MAX=3600
 BLOCKLIST_URL="https://rapidblock.org/blocklist.json"
 SIGNATURE_URL="https://rapidblock.org/blocklist.json.sig"
 PUBLIC_KEY_FILE="/opt/rapidblock/share/rapidblock-dot-org.pub"
 INSTANCES=( \
   "mastodon-4.x|postgresql:///mastodon?host=/run/postgresql&port=5433" \
 )

In this format, the toolset is disabled and needs configuration you need to set the following ENABLED=1 set instance type and use either mastodon-3.x or mastodon-4.x matching the version of Mastodon you are using.

For a local database:

 INSTANCES=( \
   "mastodon-4.x|postgresql:///mastodon_database_name?host=/run/postgresql&port=5433" \
 )

For a remote database:

 INSTANCES=( \
   "mastodon-4.x|postgresql:///mastodon_database_name?host=db.host.name&port=5432&user=username&password=secret" \
 )

Once these have been set the script will be called via a cronjob every hour where it will sleep a random amount of time from 0 to 3600 seconds and will then download the update and install it.