Mastodon: Limit federation

[mrrcollins]

I have Mastodon set up for my school district, but I want to limit the federation of it to other K12 schools. Where do I control this?

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• [X ] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[Fastidious]

@mrrcollins I do not think it is possible.

[carlosjs23]

I think, blacklisting instances published in instances.mastodon.xyz and whitelisting instances of the other K12 schools in nginx could be a trick, however not all instances are posted there.

[Fastidious]

@carlosjs23 @mrrcollins alternatively, if you are going the black/whitelisting route, just setup firewalls and only allow the other schools IP through it. The same will have to be done on the other schools though.

[carlosjs23]

@Fastidious I assumed that the instance is being exposed on the internet and not on an internal network, keeping my guess if @mrrcollins does what you mention, internet users will not be able to enter any of the instances.

If users are also expected to enter through the alleged internal network, then he can do as you mention.

In any case, more details about the network are needed.

[Fastidious]

@carlosjs23 I work for a university. I think @mrrcollins only wants the schools to federate amongst each other (which, by the way, it goes against what the whole federation thing is about, but I digress).

[carlosjs23]

If it is the case, I agree with you, but not in that it goes against the federation, since I see that he wants to give it a healthy and particular use.

In any case, we must stop guessing and expect clarification from him.

[mrrcollins]

I'm looking at using Mastodon to teach students K-12 social media usage. As such, it would be nice to keep the server limited to only other K12 instances.

Students would then be able to follow students in other districts, without all of the "complexities" that would arise if it was totally public and federated.

Basically, black list all other instances, and then whitelist specific instances.

[expenses]

@mrrcollins You can't blacklist all instances at the moment?

EDIT: I mean , you can't use a setting like blacklist: '*' and then whitelist the ones you want like whitelist: ['mastodon.social', 'mastodon.global'] etc?

[Fastidious]

Blacklisting instances isn’t fool proof, as instances are popping up left and right now. There is no way to keep it up. Using iptables (or similar) to only grant access to the other K-12 schools, and sharing the configuration with those other schools, is the only fool proof method.

[mrrcollins]

@expenses : I'm new at administering Mastodon, where is the blacklist and whitelist settings?

@Fastidious : If I used a firewall (iptables), wouldn't that block clients from working?

[expenses]

@mrrcollins I'm not sure, I was just being theoretical.

[mrrcollins]

@expenses You had me all excited there, because that's exactly what I was hoping existed! Lol!

[Ragzouken]

ask the admin at awoo.space mb - there is whitelist only

[wxcafe]

The comment by @Ragzouken is the right answer. The admin at awoo.space is @[email protected]. Closing this since the issue is not with mastodon and an answer has been supplied.