Conversation

Regarding the current spam, the fediverse is built in a very strange and beautiful way.

With 10,000+ Mastodon servers (excluding the thousands of other services), all managed to different levels of complexity by different people, with their own opinions on how things should be handled, running slightly different versions (or even different forks).

There is pretty much no coordination from a technical level to share threats or risks outside of an ever more cursed series of group chats and Discord servers... In fact, Mastodon doesn't even have a concept of "server-to-server" communication (subject to change very recently) so admins couldn't forward spammers' emails/IP addresses or any kind of metadata in case of attackers using any kind of shared infra.

There is nothing, not even a captcha (until recently), stopping people from spending an hour writing a few scripts to create millions of fake accounts and spamming the ecosystem, or creating a DOS bot to upload large files on bulk and replicate those across 10,000 S3 mirrors wasting bandwidth and money. (Why is there 10,000 S3 buckets? because people will scream and cry it's *centralisation* to only have 4000 S3 buckets with a little deduplication.) Won't somebody think of the ideology.

The fediverse is amazing wasteful of peoples time and money... and we can build some "shared services" such as Jortage (or a CDN for the fediverse) to remove a lot of wasteful compute and bandwidth.. as well as increasing safety at the same time which is another cost. The mental burden on the tens of thousands of moderators in our ecoystem putting out the same fire on their instance and being unable to help the other instances... imagine a massive global team of people having to do the same thing over and over because there isn't any way to support each other (by design?).

You could easily bankrupt most of the fediverse in a week because nobody watches their data usage, and lots of people pay for bandwidth....

Now, lots of people have been talking about making things to improve this ecosystem, but nobody has the cash to fix this problem "correctly"... But the good news? There are a few projects on the go to try to fix this.

2024 is the year of the fediverse reinventing the wheel when we've been dealing with spam on the internet since it started... But I do love a new wheel.

like every healthy relationship, communication is key.

The only reason the fediverse works, is because there are infinitely more good actors, than bad actors. It's goodwill and best intentions... and I love it, but we need to help ourselves.