> You can choose to accept trackbacks only from sites that can point to endorsement by some mutually trusted 3rd party. This is ultimately how the Fediverse wor

> You can choose to accept trackbacks only from sites that can point to endorsement by some mutually trusted 3rd party. This is ultimately how the Fediverse works - bad actors will get booted from the most popular networks and find themselves unable to 'push' content to the network. I suppose this would have worked in the 2005-ish era when MovableType, Pingbacks/Linkbacks, and Web 2.0 was all the rage, but in today's internet culture and its very partisan politics (...of a distinctly American flavour...) permeating everywhere, the concept of "endorsement", even in a technical sense, can be framed as a political gesture, even if the basis of an endorsement can be defended on purely technical grounds. We saw this happening with the "Twitter Verified" badges controversy (as the identity-verification of an account is a purely technical and factual thing, but because Twitter chose to use the imagery-of-endorsement to indicate verified accounts it led to... well, that's another discussion). My point being that even if a pingback/linkback/trackback system can accurately filter-out (commercial) spam, maintainers of those websites would likely still want to curate pingbacks anyway - which means still having to actively moderate/audit that, and who wants to spend their time doing that?