I'm really disappointed to discover that the Fediverse apparently put so little thought into spam prevention. The entire history of email spam is right there to learn from. This current spam campaign is about as sophisticated as an email spam campaign from the 90s, yet apparently there's nothing I can do about it beyond playing whack-a-mole with blocking disposable accounts and servers.
I really hope I'm wrong here and missing something because if not this is super super super disappointing.
Yes, part of the issue here is that I'm on my own personal instance — but that's only because I can’t be @jacobian.org without admining my own instance. I've had my own email domain for like twenty years but have been able to rely on safety-in-numbers because MX records exist and so do sophisticated email spam protection tools and protocols.
@jacob While I wish the Takahē way of "you can have multiple domains on one instance" had got more traction, if this comes for me I'm going to see if I can find a friendly server admin of a big server, donate them some money, and automate syncing their blocklist entries. Centralised moderation and federation control is the only way this is going to get solved, I suspect.
@andrew@jacob I think “centralized” is the wrong way to think about it. “Scaled” is closer to the right idea. We don’t need universal agreement on moderation policy, just large enough granularity on moderation scope that groups can meaningfully negotiate with each other.
@andrew@jacob I figured this is what you were getting at, but the term “centralization” is such a nucleation point for Discourse Guys on the fediverse that I find it helpful to scrupulously avoid when possible
This might be the final nail in the coffin for my presence on Mastodon. It's not a ton of time, 20-30 minutes a day or so, but it's time I don't want and shouldn't have to spend. If a solution doesn’t present itself I don't see how I can keep my account active.
@raphael I'd love good spam filtering, and I'd be pretty happy to migrate to Takahe, but I very much don't want to admin my own instance. I'm paying @mastohost to host my domain and very very happy with them. So until/unless there's paid Takahe hosting, probably not. As much as I'd feel great about a Django-based server, not being a sysadmin is a bigger goal by far.
@jacob I'm on the main server people default to and I'm reporting/blocking a dozen accounts a day. I assumed it was related to the bugs I see people talking about, but you might be on to something.
@jacob Never occurred to me that potentially one could be on, say, mastodon.social or any big, (supposedly) well managed instance and yet retain one's domain. I'm too conditioned by how the current apps work it seems...
@astrojuanlu there's nothing in the protocol that implies account == server — in fact, Takahe (https://jointakahe.org/) supports multiple domains by design. Mastodon just has chosen not to.
If you think about it, it's a weird choice. Imagine if domain names implied running your own server — AWS couldn't exist! Etc. Almost every internet protocol allows for some indirection between domain and physical host, it's just that Mastodon has chosen not to for reasons I don't quite grok.
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