> tends to accumulate second-hand spam The second hand also has to follow spammers. Most humans just don't do that, do they? > It was the driver in case of e-

> tends to accumulate second-hand spam The second hand also has to follow spammers. Most humans just don't do that, do they? > It was the driver in case of e-mail, but e.g. for Mastodon, I'd say political extremism is the primary force. The result ends up being the same, because the dynamics are content-agnostic: users migrate to nodes that offer most reliable communication, and as those nodes grow in usercount, it makes it easier for them to fight undesired communication with blunt tools (e.g. instance or IP blocklists). I agree with this bit. But I think there is an opportunity to avoid it this time. We're much more aware of the potential pitfalls than when email was conceptualized as a protocol, and we have some quite amazing tools to tackle some of these challenges differently. I predict we'll see some innovation on this front, and I'm honestly pondering participating in that effort. The fruits of that would be very much worth it.