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Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links. I miss the late 90s when you had a lot of small, independent websi

Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links. I miss the late 90s when you had a lot of small, independent websites. Sure there was always a war against spammers and scripts, but I feel like you could find more independent content from individuals instead of these big link aggregation platforms (remember web-rings?) There is more to think about today when making something that hosts other's content (or links to that content). I'm surprised ActivityPub networks (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) haven't had more issues with spam and bad actors. When starting a project like this, I think a few small things authors should consider right off the bat: implement some Captcha (preferably an open source implementation that's not Google mandated tracking, if you can find something decent), for at least account creation .. maybe posts too. I'm not sure what Lobsters uses for spam testing/filtering, but it'd be worth looking at that and other projects for any quick solutions. Prismo (https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo) also comes to mind.

mehhh 7y ago
Hosts of ActivityPub based platforms have all kinds of troubles with users and instances that are abusive and/or datamining. Thing is, the instances are generally small and good admins communicate, dropping known abusive IPs and reaching out to server hosts when abusive instances violate local laws like the CFAA.
cc-d 7y ago
Captcha option has been implemented since before release, just disabled.It is enabled now. Content marked as "nsfw" will not show up in the default index page, and nsfw posts in sfw subs will have the thumbnail hidden. This was 'resubmitted' here when I was sleeping. I woke up to a site I left misconfigured being flooded with people lol.
busymom0 7y ago
Lobsters is invite only (last I checked) so that prevents spam.
zaarn 7y ago
Most Masto/Pleroma instances are too small to be worth the trouble. I get about 1-2 spam bots signing up per week, usually deleted automatically or within 1 hour of signing up (longer if all the admins are sleeping). Small instances that don't do anything about spam usually get defederated fairly quickly. With the way federation works, your reach is very unpredictable and you need to attach to very large instances if you want to have any effect. And large instances have more moderators to more quickly handle them. Per-user mastodon probably has more moderators/administrators than comparable services (twitter), so it's a bit more clean.
brnt 7y ago
> Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links. Not that I need further proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and still am attracted to "anonymous" "free" "speech", I'm using TOR at work to avoid being flagged for such accidental visits.
davefp 7y ago
Lobsters uses an invitation tree, you can read a bit more about it here: https://lobste.rs/about https://lobste.rs/about

mehhh 7y ago

Hosts of ActivityPub based platforms have all kinds of troubles with users and instances that are abusive and/or datamining. Thing is, the instances are generally small and good admins communicate, dropping known abusive IPs and reaching out to server hosts when abusive instances violate local laws like the CFAA.

cc-d 7y ago

Captcha option has been implemented since before release, just disabled.It is enabled now. Content marked as "nsfw" will not show up in the default index page, and nsfw posts in sfw subs will have the thumbnail hidden. This was 'resubmitted' here when I was sleeping. I woke up to a site I left misconfigured being flooded with people lol.

busymom0 7y ago

Lobsters is invite only (last I checked) so that prevents spam.

zaarn 7y ago

Most Masto/Pleroma instances are too small to be worth the trouble. I get about 1-2 spam bots signing up per week, usually deleted automatically or within 1 hour of signing up (longer if all the admins are sleeping). Small instances that don't do anything about spam usually get defederated fairly quickly. With the way federation works, your reach is very unpredictable and you need to attach to very large instances if you want to have any effect. And large instances have more moderators to more quickly handle them. Per-user mastodon probably has more moderators/administrators than comparable services (twitter), so it's a bit more clean.

brnt 7y ago

> Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links. Not that I need further proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and still am attracted to "anonymous" "free" "speech", I'm using TOR at work to avoid being flagged for such accidental visits.

davefp 7y ago

Lobsters uses an invitation tree, you can read a bit more about it here: https://lobste.rs/about https://lobste.rs/about