this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
51 points (98.1% liked)
Fediverse
28483 readers
866 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sadly, this may signal the end of open federation. I can't see how trust by default is going to work long term.
It depends on how federated platforms react, it’s necessary to control who signs up in some way, if that’s “globally” accepted trust can hold well long term.
Right now the instances are working to stifle this by restricting account creation, but we're just a step away from spammers creating instances on demand, flooding networks with stuff like the crypto spam on Reddit. I'm thinking major instances are going to have to go whitelist federation as a result.
I would not be surprised if at some point you have a few whitelists, or some kind of reputation management for instances. One could even say they can have a karma number associated to them.
In the end, this is the same problem as for emails and the landscape will probably structure itself around several big actors and countless of smaller actors who will have to be really careful in order to not be defederated.
A reputation system is really important. Open federation may not be viable long term without one.
That's an interesting idea. For each instance give users the ability to mark as spam comments/posts, then make it so each instance keeps track of what the ratio of spam vs not-spam is coming from peer instances and block any that exceed a certain ratio. It could easily be made automatic with manual intervention for edge cases.
One issue I could see is that it could be used as a way of blacklisting smaller instances from larger instances by using bot accounts on the larger instances to mark the smaller instance's legitimate traffic as spam. It would likely be necessary to implement a limit on how young/active an account can be to mark comments/posts as spam, as well as rate-limiting for situations where a given smaller community that is a subset of the larger one decides to dogpile on a smaller instance in an attempt to block them from the entire community.
This is one place where 2-of-3 multisig crypto could truly excel. If posters were required to have, say, $5 in XYZ per account per site, but that $5 will get you access to every site on the fediverse AND you can withdrawal it whenever you want, but it will close your accounts. Like a $5 participation escrow. Spammers could still spam, but they'd need to have $5 per account created to do so. I'm sure there are pros and cons to this, but it is technologically feasible.
You just described token gating, not multisig. Also you can do multisig without involving any money (or tokens)
My comment says deleted by creator (I didn't delete it) so I don't remember exactly what I said, but the point is to temporarily (as long as the account exists) put money on the books, which can be taken if you spam but you can withdrawal it when you close your account if you don't. There would need to be a trusted signing authority so instance admins couldn't just take it.