# content
@gaditb@icosahedron.website

I think the Bluesky example you linked to is an unfortunate illustration of what happens when we expect technical tools to cleanly solve social problems. Making a blocklist public is obviously egregious, but even private exclusions can be exposed through old-fashioned social interactions. For example, someone casually referencing a post might unintentionally reveal to someone else that they weren't included.

In Bonfire, boundaries aren’t meant to control what others do on their own instance (apart from defining who an activity is addressed to, similarly to BCC with email). They’re more about controlling what reaches you on yours. Since ActivityPub doesn’t yet support strong security features like end-to-end encryption or object capabilities, boundaries are designed as a local-first mechanism. They help shape your experience and interactions rather than enforcing strict rules across the network.

So, in your example, if someone starts harassing you, you can block them, or just silence them or the thread in question. From your perspective, those replies disappear, and new ones won’t appear at all. Your instance silently enforces these boundaries by ignoring unwanted interactions, even if the sender’s server is unaware and still allows them to post.

It’s not perfect privacy or hard enforcement but harm reduction and local autonomy in a messy, federated world...

# source.content
[@gaditb@icosahedron.website](https://icosahedron.website/users/gaditb) \ \ I think the Bluesky example you linked to is an unfortunate illustration of what happens when we expect technical tools to cleanly solve social problems. Making a blocklist public is obviously egregious, but even private exclusions can be exposed through old-fashioned social interactions. For example, someone casually referencing a post might unintentionally reveal to someone else that they weren't included.
In Bonfire, boundaries aren’t meant to control what others do on their own instance (apart from defining who an activity is addressed to, similarly to BCC with email). They’re more about controlling what reaches *you* on yours. Since ActivityPub doesn’t yet support strong security features like end-to-end encryption or object capabilities, boundaries are designed as a local-first mechanism. They help shape your experience and interactions rather than enforcing strict rules across the network.
So, in your example, if someone starts harassing you, you can block them, or just silence them or the thread in question. From your perspective, those replies disappear, and new ones won’t appear at all. Your instance silently enforces these boundaries by ignoring unwanted interactions, even if the sender’s server is unaware and still allows them to post.
It’s not perfect privacy or hard enforcement but harm reduction and local autonomy in a messy, federated world...