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That would imply that centralized solutions would have even less spam, since they have much stronger guarantees of identity. And yet sites like Twitter has plen

That would imply that centralized solutions would have even less spam, since they have much stronger guarantees of identity. And yet sites like Twitter has plenty of spam. Even Hacker News gets spam! And this is not a popular place in the grand scheme of things. How is distributed identity solved in the long term? Nobody would run a server to communicate spam; that's rarely how email spam is sent these days. Most of the spam I get is from accounts hosted on GMail and Yahoo!. So the weakest link is a single server that's community-respected, but doesn't have adequate spam protection. Federation makes that much harder, because the whole point is that every server is run separately. Mastodon gets no spam today because it's smaller than Hacker News. There's relatively nobody on there.

kzrdude 6y ago
I'm worried how mastodon is going to scale (in terms of moderation) - maybe some instance can experient with crowd sourced moderation.
- indigochill 6y ago
  Part of the point, as I understand it, is that moderation scales more-or-less linearly because each instance is ideally human-scale (that is, maybe having hundreds of members as opposed to millions) and responsible for its own moderation, unlike sites like Twitter or Facebook which have to pay a relatively small team of moderators to moderate millions of people's communications. There's nothing saying any particular instance will moderate, but if they don't and it becomes a problem they'll quickly find themselves cut off from federating with other instances.
riffic 6y ago
> How is distributed identity solved in the long term? Same way email handles it -- through the use of the domain name system. You'd expect that an a federated server with the address "https://mastodon.mit.edu/ https://mastodon.mit.edu/" would consist of those with a tie to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (faculty or students). Your identity is provided by the system you are a member of and handled by your specific system administrator.
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  That doesn't solve the spam problem, though? The issue from spam is that bad actors can sign up for any number of free-standing servers, without being blocked from the service as a whole. Blocking whole servers isn't the solution; that just leads to a weird scenario where you can't reach some of your contacts because they lucked out and picked the wrong server when signing up.
  - riffic 6y ago
    there's a lot of talk about object capabilities as a model to solve for this in the AP space. A lot of it goes over my head so I can't really go into details on it but there are some conference talks available where this is a topic. background info: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/ap-unwanted-messages.md https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/t... https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub

kzrdude 6y ago

I'm worried how mastodon is going to scale (in terms of moderation) - maybe some instance can experient with crowd sourced moderation.

indigochill 6y ago
Part of the point, as I understand it, is that moderation scales more-or-less linearly because each instance is ideally human-scale (that is, maybe having hundreds of members as opposed to millions) and responsible for its own moderation, unlike sites like Twitter or Facebook which have to pay a relatively small team of moderators to moderate millions of people's communications. There's nothing saying any particular instance will moderate, but if they don't and it becomes a problem they'll quickly find themselves cut off from federating with other instances.

riffic 6y ago

> How is distributed identity solved in the long term? Same way email handles it -- through the use of the domain name system. You'd expect that an a federated server with the address "https://mastodon.mit.edu/ https://mastodon.mit.edu/" would consist of those with a tie to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (faculty or students). Your identity is provided by the system you are a member of and handled by your specific system administrator.

Jasper_ 6y ago
That doesn't solve the spam problem, though? The issue from spam is that bad actors can sign up for any number of free-standing servers, without being blocked from the service as a whole. Blocking whole servers isn't the solution; that just leads to a weird scenario where you can't reach some of your contacts because they lucked out and picked the wrong server when signing up.
- riffic 6y ago
  there's a lot of talk about object capabilities as a model to solve for this in the AP space. A lot of it goes over my head so I can't really go into details on it but there are some conference talks available where this is a topic. background info: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/ap-unwanted-messages.md https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/t... https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub