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This indeed looks like a good direction. A decade ago Freenet (not sure if it still exists?) had a problem with spam on its equivalent of USENET. It was pretty

This indeed looks like a good direction. A decade ago Freenet (not sure if it still exists?) had a problem with spam on its equivalent of USENET. It was pretty bad, until they changed the protocol so that it's the sending node that keeps the message, which is then pulled (or not) by the recipients. It made a lot of sense to me: I'm the one sending you the message, I want you to see it, while you don't even know whether you want to get that message. So it's me that should pay for storage and propagation of the message in terms of bandwidth and disk space. Not sure how it turned out in the end, but the approach seems right to me. It's like phone calls: it's the caller that pays the cost, not the one receiving the call.

klabb3 4y ago
Wow that's ingenious - and obvious when you think about it. I guess evolving the email standard is a much bigger obstacle though, no matter how clever the proposal.
- flomo 4y ago
  An attempt was made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000
- pas 4y ago
  it's ridiculously easy to create a template that is stored and when the remote client pulls the message only a few variables has to be substituted. it's how spam is generated after all :)
  - klibertp 4y ago
    Yes, but in the context of Freenet specifically, there's a lot of encryption and hashing involved in every transaction, which are computationally expensive, and there's no CGI equivalent at all (the whole network is basically static, append-only content addressed with the content's hash). So to create many messages you'd need to first generate the content, then encrypt and hash it, then insert it into the network starting at your node, then provide signature and checksum verification on every request. After some time, if the content is widely requested, some other nodes will cache it, but you can't really expect spam to propagate via web of trust; it's more probable that it will be added to spam filters which, themselves, will propagate. As everything is signed, you'd need to create a fresh node for each spam, but that means your new identity is not trusted by anyone - you'd need to convince at least some users that you're a user that won't abuse the system. Only to get your whole identity blacklisted once you do abuse it. It wasn't perfect, and Freenet's usage was a huge PITA from the usability/ux perspective, but in a constrained environment like that this change in the protocol had much bigger impact than it would on the open web. Not sure how it turned out, but the trend until I left the community was very positive with regards to spam.

klabb3 4y ago

Wow that's ingenious - and obvious when you think about it. I guess evolving the email standard is a much bigger obstacle though, no matter how clever the proposal.

flomo 4y ago
An attempt was made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000
pas 4y ago
it's ridiculously easy to create a template that is stored and when the remote client pulls the message only a few variables has to be substituted. it's how spam is generated after all :)
- klibertp 4y ago
  Yes, but in the context of Freenet specifically, there's a lot of encryption and hashing involved in every transaction, which are computationally expensive, and there's no CGI equivalent at all (the whole network is basically static, append-only content addressed with the content's hash). So to create many messages you'd need to first generate the content, then encrypt and hash it, then insert it into the network starting at your node, then provide signature and checksum verification on every request. After some time, if the content is widely requested, some other nodes will cache it, but you can't really expect spam to propagate via web of trust; it's more probable that it will be added to spam filters which, themselves, will propagate. As everything is signed, you'd need to create a fresh node for each spam, but that means your new identity is not trusted by anyone - you'd need to convince at least some users that you're a user that won't abuse the system. Only to get your whole identity blacklisted once you do abuse it. It wasn't perfect, and Freenet's usage was a huge PITA from the usability/ux perspective, but in a constrained environment like that this change in the protocol had much bigger impact than it would on the open web. Not sure how it turned out, but the trend until I left the community was very positive with regards to spam.