mastodonmigration

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@atomicpoet LOL... Does a fire zone count?

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

So what is going on? Recently mastodon.social (m.s) has been the target of crypto spam attacks. Attackers have joined m.s and started to post many irrelevant crypto related posts. Moderators on m.s have tracked down these bad actors and isolated them, but some sneak through while the moderation effort tracks them down. It has been dealt with pretty swiftly.

2/
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Also happening recently, Eugen Rochko @Gargron, the developer of Mastodon changed the sign up process, ostensibly to make it simpler, such that people now are funneled onto mastodon.social (m.s) unless they select a different instance. This has been the source of some concern that m.s will be oversubscribed and be vulnerable to hacker attacks, as well as performance issues. Some regard the concentration at m.s as anti-Fediverse in principle.

3/
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@Gargron People point to the issue of "too big to defederate" as a reason that large instances like m.s are a bad thing. The logic goes that if bad actors are left unchecked then other instances can not simple defederate m.s because that would block too many other accounts. It is certainly true that it is not really possible to defederate a very large instance so large instances have a big responsibility to police themselves.

/4
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

@Gargron Smaller instances always have the threat of defederation as motivation for doing a good job of moderating their users, but bad actors piling on a smaller instance happens too as we have seen in numerous attacks. Simply defederating that instance without any means of re-federation would disenfranchise all those users, so that's another issue that needs our attention.

/5
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@Gargron So the question remains: Should you move to a smaller instance? The answer is you are free to do whatever you want. Some people like smaller instances because of the greater sense of community or common interest. Some people like big instances because of the broader perspective they may afford. It's up to you.

If you are on mastodon.social and want a more intimate experience, open an account on a smaller server and give it a try. It's your social network.

/6
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@MissingThePt This seems like a good idea. Hope that it is productive. It certainly is the case that it is more difficult to moderate large instances and that moderation resources must be increased in some proportion to the size of the instance. The analogy would be to the law enforcement resources needed for a big city versus a smaller town. However, if is not valid to conclude that just because there is some crime in a city that they are not doing an adequate amount of policing.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@pixelpusher220 @Gargron No that is certainly not the case. However, in practice, once your instance gets on a ban list it may be difficult to get it removed from the list.

What is being said is that moderation in a federated environment is not simple and that there are multiple aspects which need to be successfully coordinated to keep our communities safe from both outside attack and unwanted isolation of normal users.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@pixelpusher220 @Gargron Absolutely. The only point here, is that these are early days. Our community is going to come under attack from different directions as we get bigger and more influential and we need to establish more sophisticated and comprehensive means of managing and coordinating our moderation resources both human and technical.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@globalpilgrim @Gargron You can open an account on another instance and keep your current account. You can look at https://joinmastodon.org/servers for some information on various instances. A good way to get a feel for an instance is to look at their /explore page (eg. https://universeodon.com/explore), which shows you what posts are currently popular among members of that instance. Happy hunting.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@kevindalley @Gargron Full statement:

Hello everyone! We’ve seen a large number of spam direct posts from mastodon.social. We have temporarily limited federation with them.

Apologies for the inconvenience, we plan to reassess/reenable full federation tomorrow if the issue is resolved.

https://sfba.social/@announcements/110368103560944346

...

We are using “limited” federation. This setting means that we only receive and process events for people who are followed by our users...

#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@kkarhan There seem to be a small number of instances that temporarily partially defederated mastodon.social (m.s) WHILE the crypto attacks were underway and being addressed. Rather than use this fact to scare m.s users that they face some sort of permanent isolation, it might be better to be clear about what is actually happening. This, by David Carroll @profcarroll is a much more sober and helpful post (https://federate.social/@profcarroll/110368100537767122).

1/
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@kkarhan @profcarroll Here the point is phased:

"One emergent downside of being on mastodon.social is that you’ll get a temporary defed by a subset of the fedi while a #cryptospam op is going down"

OK, that's helpful. That's something that people can use to help make a real decision. It's a far cry from permanent isolation.

The same temporary measures might be applied to other instances should they be targets of attack.

Seems like this is the system working.

2/
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

@kkarhan @profcarroll Not saying you are trying to scare anyone, but the subject post certainly is.

And certainly centralization in a big instance, or concentration in a few large instances, is a community issue. We should definitely have discussions about this. But conflating big instances with cryto spam hacker problems is inaccurate and misleading and does a disservice to the larger issues of the desirability of decentralization for a whole myriad of reasons.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@kkarhan @profcarroll Absolutely agree that a lot of attention to spamming and effective community wide measures to address this threat is a very good thing.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@daniel As discussed above, the issue here is not whether some instances temporarily blocked mastodon.social while the attack was going on. The implication was that people on mastodon.social were at risk for being "defederated" and that they should change instances to avoid this. This was a misleading because peoples accounts on mastodon.social are not at risk of being isolated.

1/

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

@daniel If what had been presented is that instances under attack may be temporarily defederate, and that mastodon.social has recently experienced hacker attacks, which resulted in a few instances blocking them for a short period of time while the attack was being addressed that would not have been as frightening.

In fact, that would be a good description of the system working as intended. Isolating the area under attack while the problem was addressed.

2/

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@daniel The implication is that mastodon.social is particularly vulnerable to such attacks because it is big, and it is too big to be successfully moderated. This simply does not make sense. Any instance with open admissions can easily be subject to such attacks and while it is certainly difficult to moderate larger instances it is just a matter of allocating sufficient resources. In this case the attack was dealt with pretty swiftly, so it is not a good example of a breakdown.

3/

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@daniel Any instance, big, medium or small that is targeted in this manner will need to do the same thing. It will need to address the attack and while it is doing so, it may be defederated. Hopefully, that defederation will only be temporary as was the case with the latest mastodon.social incident. One could say that smaller instances have the risk that if they don't respond quickly enough it could trigger more permanent isolations. These are all issues we should be discussing.

4/

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@daniel What attacks like this are intended to do is to exploit our weaknesses and create dissention. Rather that use this attack that was basically thwarted to initiate a blame game, we should be taking lessons from it on how better to manage the next assault, Because the bad actors are not done with us, not by a long shot. We got this, but we have to work together.

5/

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@billyjoebowers It's a good analog. A good way to think about the Fediverse is as a bunch of interconnected cities, towns and villages. Governance of each locality has its own complexities, and requires different resources, but they all have a common need to stop bad actors and maintain good communication amongst themselves about threats to public safety.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@bassim Thank you too! Truly believe we have a chance to build something very special and consequential for our collective futures here. It's not often ordinary people get such an opportunity. We can do this if we continue to work together and solve problems with a spirit of community, good will, hope and understanding.

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@rysiek The thing about Mastodon that gives us a fighting chance at this is that we generally are civic minded and care about our communities big and small. When an invader shows up bend on wrecking havoc, we pull together and deal with them. It is fine to then assess what happened, what went wrong, and how to do better in the future. But casting aspersions and attributing bad faith motives to one another is not the right path. Dividing the community is how the attacker wins.

5/
#moderation

mastodonmigration, 1 year ago

@rysiek Bubbling out to a more macro view, we can take great pride in the fact that we are by and large a strong community that cares about respect for each other, and that we have the culture, structure and tools that give us a fighting chance of maintaining these social norms. This is what is really unique about Mastodon and the Fediverse, and it has its roots in our genesis. Bottom line, it's a nice place and we intend to keep it that way. We got this!

6/
#moderation