#UnpopularOpinion The current spam wave supports one of my suspicions that federated networks should be built as a web of trust, Friends of a Friend style. Open registrations invite abuse and there's only so much algorithmic stuff you can throw at that. An invitation based system is also not a perfect solution as it creates artificial scarcity. A solution somewhere in-between is needed but I am still pondering how that could look like. Will continue my thoughts as a thread starting here.
@jwildeboer i wonder ever again why a web of trust concept isn’t used more often in social media and other systems on the internet… also interesting for product/service review sites.
is there any service that uses such things? the last one i only vaguely remember was that developer community- advocato or something like that - unfortunately ungoogleable because of the fruit.
@kikobar@lazyb0y@jwildeboer i know about gpg keysigning and asked for services(in the context of social media) that use a web of trust, also a specific one that used to exist.
And that's where I come back to my first point. The role of instance admins. This spam wave has uncovered an ugly truth. Many small instances out there have open registration and a high latency on admins doing their admin tasks on their instance. Simply blocking all those instances attacks the core philosophy of the fediverse, IMHO, where I want to see many small instances instead of an oligopoly of a few big ones. This tendency towards big instances is, again, not a new thing.
(I will take a break now. This thread will also be turned into a blogpost at https://jan.wildeboer.net and I might even continue to write there instead of in this thread. Also one of my rules. If it needs more than 4 toots, it's a blog entry ;)
@jwildeboer I believe the combination of web of trust with smaller instances is probably the most effective approach.
Moderation does not scale well, not even when automated (ask commercial social networks).
Web of trust is effective on smaller networks only (I mean when each node vouches for a small group of people they know well, like in real life).
I believe that was ultimately the whole point of being descentralised after all.
I can believe that a bit larger cooperative commons model could work, where there is a community of users and a democratic governance model, which ultimately implies that the people in the instance really know each other.
I have my doubts about the super-large instances ran as an enterprise. They may not be the origin of the spam (like in the last few days), but they were the medium of propagation. 🤔
I am curious about the lessons learned over the last few days.
@jwildeboer Using an invite-only system would have banned me from #Mastodon... when I came here, I knew no one. (ok, not that true, I recognized two or three people from Twitter but did not know they where here before. And like most using both platforms: Those where not very active here)
@sequundi@jwildeboer web of trust does not mean 'invitation only' - means that someone needs to vouch for or validate the new user.
If someone doesn't know anyone, just need to write to the admin and request for an account, who is expected to be a Human being and do some minimum verification on the new user + keep an eye on them for some time (knowing that will be their job to moderate that user forever).
Yes, it is a lot of initial work, but I believe it should be lesser trouble in the long run.
Of course, the user may choose to run their own instance, but that is asking for far too much if we want non-IT-literate people's voices in the Fedi too, which we certainly do.
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