4 ms·

I dont see why the identity providers couldnt pass trust ratings between each other.

by basch 6y ago

jsnell 6y ago
There's one element of the tragedy of the commons. Honest Bob's Social Media Emporium might not be entirely motivated to mark their users as untrusted, when most of the pain of the spam is felt by the other thousands of providers they federate with. "Hey, doing SMS verification of new accounts is expensive, but required by the other nodes on the network. How about we don't, but say we did?" Imagine a solution to email spam that replaced looking at IP address reputation with looking at the sender's claim about their own reputation. Laughable idea, right? The other problem with your suggestion is that you can't do abuse prevention with a single signal, even if it's not Boolean. I even gave an example in the previous post, with checking whether accounts doing similar abuse were clustered together at account creation time.
- basch 6y ago
  Then " Bob's Social Media Emporium" as a whole would get dinged in the trust web. If you cant trust the verifier, you wouldnt trust any of their participants. I guess nitpicking the details doesnt matter, but none of these problems seem insurmountable.
  - jsnell 6y ago
    Oh, man. You dropped the "Honest" out of "Honest Bob". That's harsh, it's like you think he's some kind of a crook :( Once the biggest node on this network starts not peering with smaller nodes due to them being untrustworthy, what do you think happens? I suspect that the users will move from the smaller nodes to the bigger ones. And then we're right back to where we started. People will be complaining about monopolies and will want the big nodes broken up.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      This does seem like a genuine problem, and there are already signs of this happening in the Fediverse. Perhaps it needs a name, so that people can notice when it is happening, and discuss potential solutions to it. The name I propose is "Federator's Dilemma", as it seems like a game theoretic problem. As for a solution, my intuition is that the first step might be to create a Sybil-proof voting system for determining how popular individual services are. If a service is refused federation by other services which collectively contain 90% of user accounts, then that's a sign that the service doesn't do enough to stop its users from posting objectionable content. Similarly, service A could report to service B how many abuse reports it is getting from its users about people on service B, with a clear rule about when service B would be blocked. This isn't a perfect system, and I admit that a Sybil-proof global anonymous distributed voting system might be harder than just solving the Federator's Dilemma more directly, but I think it's worth considering, not least because such a voting system would be useful for countless other applications online.

I dont see why the identity providers couldnt pass trust ratings between each other.

by basch 6y ago

I dont see why the identity providers couldnt pass trust ratings between each other.

There's one element of the tragedy of the commons. Honest Bob's Social Media Emporium might not be entirely motivated to mark their users as untrusted, when most of the pain of the spam is felt by the other thousands of providers they federate with. "Hey, doing SMS verification of new accounts is expensive, but required by the other nodes on the network. How about we don't, but say we did?" Imagine a solution to email spam that replaced looking at IP address reputation with looking at the sender's claim about their own reputation. Laughable idea, right? The other problem with your suggestion is that you can't do abuse prevention with a single signal, even if it's not Boolean. I even gave an example in the previous post, with checking whether accounts doing similar abuse were clustered together at account creation time.

basch 6y ago
Then " Bob's Social Media Emporium" as a whole would get dinged in the trust web. If you cant trust the verifier, you wouldnt trust any of their participants. I guess nitpicking the details doesnt matter, but none of these problems seem insurmountable.
- jsnell 6y ago
  Oh, man. You dropped the "Honest" out of "Honest Bob". That's harsh, it's like you think he's some kind of a crook :( Once the biggest node on this network starts not peering with smaller nodes due to them being untrustworthy, what do you think happens? I suspect that the users will move from the smaller nodes to the bigger ones. And then we're right back to where we started. People will be complaining about monopolies and will want the big nodes broken up.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    This does seem like a genuine problem, and there are already signs of this happening in the Fediverse. Perhaps it needs a name, so that people can notice when it is happening, and discuss potential solutions to it. The name I propose is "Federator's Dilemma", as it seems like a game theoretic problem. As for a solution, my intuition is that the first step might be to create a Sybil-proof voting system for determining how popular individual services are. If a service is refused federation by other services which collectively contain 90% of user accounts, then that's a sign that the service doesn't do enough to stop its users from posting objectionable content. Similarly, service A could report to service B how many abuse reports it is getting from its users about people on service B, with a clear rule about when service B would be blocked. This isn't a perfect system, and I admit that a Sybil-proof global anonymous distributed voting system might be harder than just solving the Federator's Dilemma more directly, but I think it's worth considering, not least because such a voting system would be useful for countless other applications online.