shlee, 3 months ago

Regarding the current spam.. the fediverse is built in a very strange way.

10,000+ mastodon servers (excluding the thousands of other services) all managed to different levels of complexity, by different people, running slightly different versions (or even different forks).

There is pretty much no coordination from a technical level to share threats or risks outside of an ever more cursed series of groupchats and discord servers..... infact mastodon doesn't even have a concept of "server to server" communication (subject to change very recently) so admins couldn't forward spammers emails/ip addresses or any kind of metadata incase of attackers using any kind of shared infra.

There is nothing not even a captcha (until recently) stopping people from spending an hour writing a few scripts to create millions of fake accounts and spamming the ecosystem.. or creating a DOS bot to upload large files on bulk and replicate those across from 10,000 S3 mirrors wasting bandwidth and money.

You could easily bankrupt most of the fediverse in a week because nobody watches their data usage and lots of people pay for bandwidth.

Now.. lots of people have been talking about making things to improve this ecosystem, but nobody has the cash to fix this problem "correctly"... but the good news? There are a few projects on the go to try to fix this.

2024 is the year of the fediverse reinventing the wheel when we're been dealing with spam on the internet since it started... but I do love a new wheel