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How does this deal with spam? Feels like it would be very easy to create bots on all sorts of nodes in this "fediverse" that start spamming folks with garbage

How does this deal with spam? Feels like it would be very easy to create bots on all sorts of nodes in this "fediverse" that start spamming folks with garbage I've been curious for a while and have tried Mastodon, but am always left with... ok, now what?

Vinnl 7y ago
Most instances are relatively small and have a couple of dedicated moderators. They seem to deal with it fine, for all I've seen.
unionpivo 7y ago
lots of small instances. If you only have few dozen to few hundred users (think a few families, or maybe a small to medium corp) it not that hard to moderate. Hell even few thousand is manageable. Plus if one instance is constant problem you can just block it.
- Matumio 7y ago
  I hope someone has a better answer. Remember all those small forums, wikis, and wordpress blogs with open comments? Some admins spent hours manually reverting automated linkspam. Others didn't. The solution was to pay centralized services like google's recaptcha or disqus with the user's data. Mastodon is looking okay so far. But I don't think spammers are seriously targeting it yet.
  - unionpivo 7y ago
    I mean that is the whole point of federated services. If we just end up replacing one big silo with another (even if its OS at start), we haven't done much.
pferde 7y ago
"Would be"? There are already way too many bots on Mastodon, many of them do unpaid advertising for commercial news outlets (reposting their RSS feeds). I guess people who run them think they're doing "fediverse" a favour, but they're only getting more eyeballs and ad views for those outlets. The solution is liberal and frequent use of blocking, but it's a solution that does not scale well.
- nightpool 7y ago
  actually, it's a solution that scales pretty well. I help run an medium sized mastodon instance, and I managed to silence every spammy news aggregator with a couple hours of effort, It only takes a few seconds to respond to reports of new ones, and now the couple hundred people who use my server don't need to worry about RSS spam at all. Small communities allow for more effecient moderation.
  - pferde 7y ago
    Sorry for being unclear - I was referring to blocking on user level, where everyone can decide for themselves what they consider spam, instead of leaving it "for the admin".
    - toohotatopic 7y ago
      On user level, people could cooperate and make lists of spam accounts. There could be various lists with different values that determine who belongs on the list. People could subscribe to the lists that suit them and add all users on those lists to their block list.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  I run some RSS bots on Diaspora. Lots of people feel I'm providing value. They want to get this content in their feed, so they subscribe.
  - progval 7y ago
    The problem on the Fediverse is when these bots post in "public" instead of "unlisted", so everyone gets the posts in the public timeline, which gets overrun by bots.
    - pferde 7y ago
      Yes, that is exactly my problem with such bots. They turn RSS - a thing which you have to go out of your way to opt in to - to something which you have to go out of your way to opt out of.
alfiedotwtf 7y ago
People here like to shit on Bitcoin and the like, but micropayments are an excellent way to reduce spam.
- thiht 7y ago
  Even if that was the case, you would still not need bitcoin for that
  - alfiedotwtf 7y ago
    I said "Bitcoin and the like"
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  Micropayments may be a great mechanism to reduce spam, if you can get people to pay at all. Bitcoin is a terrible mechanism for micropayments. Right now, to get a transaction completed in 10 - 30 minutes (next - 3 blocks fee), it costs $0.77. If you're happy to wait an hour, it costs $0.36. (Source: https://billfodl.com/pages/bitcoinfees https://billfodl.com/pages/bitcoinfees) Disclaimer: I am long bitcoin.
  - thinkmassive 7y ago
    Lightning Network fixes this with nearly instant settlement and units divisible to the microsatoshi.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      How is it coming up?
  - app4soft 7y ago
    Here is POC of cryptocurrency donation daemon, with example usage for micro-payments for GitHub contributors.[0] [0] https://github.com/jollheef/donate https://github.com/jollheef/donate
  - 7y ago
dredmorbius 7y ago
Messages ("toots") propagate through followers. So an account that spams excessively is quite likely to be unfollowed or blocked by its followers. Probably also reported. There's also hashtag spam, which propagates via hashtag search. The one instance of that I've run into is geocoded (e.g., city-name) spam, mostly sex-oriented. That all originated from a single instance, which I've now blocked. There's a user I follow from that instance -- the follow overrides the block, so I see that person's posts. It's possible that hashtag spamming might reach toxic levels. For now, that's not been the case. People spamming their own followers should be ... pretty self-limiting.
- etxm 7y ago
  > People spamming their own followers should be ... pretty self-limiting. You haven’t met my family.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Then you probably want to use lists. This is a technical reference, though you should get a notion of capabilities from it. The UI controls are under the "Getting Started" pane, or individually on List or User panes. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/lists/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/lists/ I have about three primary ones, simply "A", "B", and "C", by priority. "A" is small and a select set of high-quality contacts I interact with frequently. "B" is far more generous. "C" is mostly oversharers. In practice I don't have that visible. I'll pin "A", "B", and "Home" (all following) most often. There are a few additional utility lists, infrequently used. Two sets for press/media ("Press" and "Voluble press", the second rarely gets used). One of a set of Mastodon admins. You'd probably want "Family" and "Family I Have to Follow" or something like that. And can probably figure out which goes where and what to do with them. Another option would be to have your general and family-specific accounts / instances, and treat those as you prefer. No reason not to segregate your social circles as suits you. I follow ... just under 666 profiles. That's a lot, though lists keep the flow managable and interesting. My pinned toots give a few other suggestions. This being one I live by, effectively, block liberally: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102504802435025145 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102504802435025145
egypturnash 7y ago
There is a human element in the new user signup path on a lot of Masto instances. For a while I had mine set to “there’s a form on the front page to fill out with an freeform text field to say why you want an account here” until the day a whole bunch of people with suspiciously similar email account names all requested new accounts and filled that space with links to buy viagra and cialis. Now it’s gone back to “ask me elsewhere, or ask a friend who is on the instance, and I will hand off an invite link”. An admin can leave her instance set to open signups, but eventually she’s probably going to turn that off once it grows to a size she starts to feel uncomfortable handling. You could always set up your own instance to spam people, but you’d quickly find the entire instance blocked. There’s a few hashtags where admins tend to share bad actor instances they’ve run across, and you’d start seeing instances you’d never made contact with blocking you preemptively.
- progval 7y ago
  > An admin can leave her instance set to open signups, but eventually she’s probably going to turn that off once it grows to a size she starts to feel uncomfortable handling. Strangely, I didn't get that much spam registrations on my instance (French-speaking; created in early 2017). There was a dozen accounts with ads for laser pointers and currently I'm getting accounts in vietnamese which don't post anything; but that's all. On the other hand, I had to silence some instances because they had way too many bots flooding the public timeline, mostly with porn.
lainsoykaf 7y ago
nobody properly deals with it yet. We are small enough for now that we can get away with moderation by hand / blocking bad instances.

Vinnl 7y ago

Most instances are relatively small and have a couple of dedicated moderators. They seem to deal with it fine, for all I've seen.

unionpivo 7y ago

lots of small instances. If you only have few dozen to few hundred users (think a few families, or maybe a small to medium corp) it not that hard to moderate. Hell even few thousand is manageable. Plus if one instance is constant problem you can just block it.

Matumio 7y ago
I hope someone has a better answer. Remember all those small forums, wikis, and wordpress blogs with open comments? Some admins spent hours manually reverting automated linkspam. Others didn't. The solution was to pay centralized services like google's recaptcha or disqus with the user's data. Mastodon is looking okay so far. But I don't think spammers are seriously targeting it yet.
- unionpivo 7y ago
  I mean that is the whole point of federated services. If we just end up replacing one big silo with another (even if its OS at start), we haven't done much.

pferde 7y ago

"Would be"? There are already way too many bots on Mastodon, many of them do unpaid advertising for commercial news outlets (reposting their RSS feeds). I guess people who run them think they're doing "fediverse" a favour, but they're only getting more eyeballs and ad views for those outlets. The solution is liberal and frequent use of blocking, but it's a solution that does not scale well.

nightpool 7y ago
actually, it's a solution that scales pretty well. I help run an medium sized mastodon instance, and I managed to silence every spammy news aggregator with a couple hours of effort, It only takes a few seconds to respond to reports of new ones, and now the couple hundred people who use my server don't need to worry about RSS spam at all. Small communities allow for more effecient moderation.
- pferde 7y ago
  Sorry for being unclear - I was referring to blocking on user level, where everyone can decide for themselves what they consider spam, instead of leaving it "for the admin".
  - toohotatopic 7y ago
    On user level, people could cooperate and make lists of spam accounts. There could be various lists with different values that determine who belongs on the list. People could subscribe to the lists that suit them and add all users on those lists to their block list.
BeetleB 7y ago
I run some RSS bots on Diaspora. Lots of people feel I'm providing value. They want to get this content in their feed, so they subscribe.
- progval 7y ago
  The problem on the Fediverse is when these bots post in "public" instead of "unlisted", so everyone gets the posts in the public timeline, which gets overrun by bots.
  - pferde 7y ago
    Yes, that is exactly my problem with such bots. They turn RSS - a thing which you have to go out of your way to opt in to - to something which you have to go out of your way to opt out of.

alfiedotwtf 7y ago

People here like to shit on Bitcoin and the like, but micropayments are an excellent way to reduce spam.

thiht 7y ago
Even if that was the case, you would still not need bitcoin for that
- alfiedotwtf 7y ago
  I said "Bitcoin and the like"
oarsinsync 7y ago
Micropayments may be a great mechanism to reduce spam, if you can get people to pay at all. Bitcoin is a terrible mechanism for micropayments. Right now, to get a transaction completed in 10 - 30 minutes (next - 3 blocks fee), it costs $0.77. If you're happy to wait an hour, it costs $0.36. (Source: https://billfodl.com/pages/bitcoinfees https://billfodl.com/pages/bitcoinfees) Disclaimer: I am long bitcoin.
- thinkmassive 7y ago
  Lightning Network fixes this with nearly instant settlement and units divisible to the microsatoshi.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    How is it coming up?
- app4soft 7y ago
  Here is POC of cryptocurrency donation daemon, with example usage for micro-payments for GitHub contributors.[0] [0] https://github.com/jollheef/donate https://github.com/jollheef/donate
- 7y ago

dredmorbius 7y ago

Messages ("toots") propagate through followers. So an account that spams excessively is quite likely to be unfollowed or blocked by its followers. Probably also reported. There's also hashtag spam, which propagates via hashtag search. The one instance of that I've run into is geocoded (e.g., city-name) spam, mostly sex-oriented. That all originated from a single instance, which I've now blocked. There's a user I follow from that instance -- the follow overrides the block, so I see that person's posts. It's possible that hashtag spamming might reach toxic levels. For now, that's not been the case. People spamming their own followers should be ... pretty self-limiting.

etxm 7y ago
> People spamming their own followers should be ... pretty self-limiting. You haven’t met my family.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Then you probably want to use lists. This is a technical reference, though you should get a notion of capabilities from it. The UI controls are under the "Getting Started" pane, or individually on List or User panes. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/lists/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/lists/ I have about three primary ones, simply "A", "B", and "C", by priority. "A" is small and a select set of high-quality contacts I interact with frequently. "B" is far more generous. "C" is mostly oversharers. In practice I don't have that visible. I'll pin "A", "B", and "Home" (all following) most often. There are a few additional utility lists, infrequently used. Two sets for press/media ("Press" and "Voluble press", the second rarely gets used). One of a set of Mastodon admins. You'd probably want "Family" and "Family I Have to Follow" or something like that. And can probably figure out which goes where and what to do with them. Another option would be to have your general and family-specific accounts / instances, and treat those as you prefer. No reason not to segregate your social circles as suits you. I follow ... just under 666 profiles. That's a lot, though lists keep the flow managable and interesting. My pinned toots give a few other suggestions. This being one I live by, effectively, block liberally: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102504802435025145 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102504802435025145

egypturnash 7y ago

There is a human element in the new user signup path on a lot of Masto instances. For a while I had mine set to “there’s a form on the front page to fill out with an freeform text field to say why you want an account here” until the day a whole bunch of people with suspiciously similar email account names all requested new accounts and filled that space with links to buy viagra and cialis. Now it’s gone back to “ask me elsewhere, or ask a friend who is on the instance, and I will hand off an invite link”. An admin can leave her instance set to open signups, but eventually she’s probably going to turn that off once it grows to a size she starts to feel uncomfortable handling. You could always set up your own instance to spam people, but you’d quickly find the entire instance blocked. There’s a few hashtags where admins tend to share bad actor instances they’ve run across, and you’d start seeing instances you’d never made contact with blocking you preemptively.

progval 7y ago
> An admin can leave her instance set to open signups, but eventually she’s probably going to turn that off once it grows to a size she starts to feel uncomfortable handling. Strangely, I didn't get that much spam registrations on my instance (French-speaking; created in early 2017). There was a dozen accounts with ads for laser pointers and currently I'm getting accounts in vietnamese which don't post anything; but that's all. On the other hand, I had to silence some instances because they had way too many bots flooding the public timeline, mostly with porn.

lainsoykaf 7y ago

nobody properly deals with it yet. We are small enough for now that we can get away with moderation by hand / blocking bad instances.