Mastodon (and the Fediverse) have grown, now spam and bots are going to become a more common and challenging threat to instances
Mastodon (and the Fediverse) have grown, now spam and bots are going to become a more common and challenging threat to instances
Something to consider with regards to spam is this: The Fediverse works very similar to email. Spam has never been solved for email, even after decades of trying all sorts of ever more complicated mechanisms. I expect it to become an equally painful and challenging problem for Fedi.
I don’t think it’s comparable since fediverse is human moderated and email is not. Messages and accounts on the fediverse are public, so moderators can remove spam before other people see it.
Accounts on existing instances can be removed and dedicated spam instances can be blocked. The only thing it does is increase the toll on moderators.
I think a big problem specifically with mastodon.social is its sheer size. I think it’s harder to effectively moderate it because of it. If the spam attack was directed at a smaller instance it would also be easy for other instances to hide or block it until it’d be sorted out, so the surface area the spam would reach would be smaller.
Spam on Fedi is @-ing people and sending the message to their instances. Unless an automated system rejects these messages before delivery, the user will get an notification. Just like email.
The big difference is that posts on the fediverse are authenticated. You know exactly from which account a message originates. You don’t have that for emails. The sender of an email can be trivially forged.
Email does Sender Verification too. And in the case of Fedi it just means there must be an account at the sender’s domain. It doesn’t have to be human. And as long as the spammers can keep generating domains they can keep sending spam…