Zelda?

Spam on Fedi is @-ing people and sending the message to their instances. Unless an automated system rejects these messages before delivery, the user will get an notification. Just like email.

Email does Sender Verification too. And in the case of Fedi it just means there must be an account at the sender’s domain. It doesn’t have to be human. And as long as the spammers can keep generating domains they can keep sending spam…

You don’t need an exploit to send spam however. Anyone can currently write a client which posts spam messages to an ActivityPub instance. It is a weakness of any open federated service. The alternative would be a closed system where moderators would first have to approve any instance federation, but that’d be a very different and insular Fediverse…

I think ultimately we’ll end up with very Email-like mitigations. Blacklists (spamhaus), message content heuristics, sender verification, etc.

Something to consider with regards to spam is this: The Fediverse works very similar to email. Spam has never been solved for email, even after decades of trying all sorts of ever more complicated mechanisms. I expect it to become an equally painful and challenging problem for Fedi.

Sure. I’m a big fan of federation. However, I switched to Mastodon (the ActivityPub application) because I liked its style better than Twitter. Turning Mastodon into Twitter to attract a larger audience and placate the complainers isn’t necessarily what everyone wants. Just my personal view on this. But it honestly doesn’t bother me that much.

The signup/moderation issue feels somewhat similar. Yeah, it would be way more Twitter-like if signup defaulted to Mastodon.social and that mega-instance hired a content moderation team to rival a professional social media site. But that’s not quite what I think is currently good about Mastodon and Fedi…

Good post. On the other hand, IMHO (as a non-Fedi-expert I should say), I think the Fediverse does not absolutely need to appeal to everyone. A lot of people are happy with Twitter, and a lot of people are happy with Facebook. Evolving Mastodon into a clone of Twitter is perhaps missing the point of building a different platform in the first place. Not to say there’s no place for new ideas or criticism of course…

To add after reading the post again: A centralized social media site with a professional content moderation team is, of course, always going to provide a better experience to new users. I don’t think a decentralized platform will ever be able to compete, by design. “Full text search” and “quote posts” are not going to help when someone accidentally joins a poorly moderated instance.

You could, but that just moves the people you follow. Your followers would still follow the old account. Mastodon has a migration option which forces users to unfollow the old account and follow the new account. But nomadic identity would really free users from their username being tied to a particular server.

FediTips might be more alarmist than most, but I agree with them. The concentration of activity on Mastodon.social is dangerous.

IMO the solution is to streamline signing up to different servers (or, and far better, implement nomadic identity!), not to continue to beef up Mastodon.social’s infrastructure and draw more and more users there…

Communities (like subreddits) typically get better with more active users. This promotes at least per-topic centralization.

I don’t think there’s a great deal of value in having 10 instances each hosting a “Retro Gaming” community. Users will naturally cluster to 1 or 2 of these. But I see no problem with the main Retro Gaming community being on instance A while the Halo Games community is on instance B.