Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Beady Belle Fanchannel (profpatsch@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jun-2026 23:56:25 JST Beady Belle Fanchannel

   So we are going to have the Email-Problem sooner or later. Sending Spam is for free and infinitely scalable.

   In order to combat this, we need to add friction to posting. The most obvious solution here is to add transaction cost in addition to moderation.

   “you can only send me a message if you pay me 1ct” for example.

   In systems like Twitter this was a hidden cost layer that active background moderation fixed, which is why Musk’s X is overrun by spam.

   #fedidev

   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jun-2026 23:56:22 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     @Profpatsch

     Sending Spam is for free and infinitely scalable.

     There were spam waves in the past, but they didn't last and didn't have much effect. Spamming is not free because you need a domain name, which is quickly blocked by most of the network.

     The worst spam waves were ones where spammers created accounts on random free-registration instances.

   • Embed this notice
     Beady Belle Fanchannel (profpatsch@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jun-2026 23:56:23 JST Beady Belle Fanchannel

     in reply to

     If we use the same payment backend and I reply to your posts about as often as you reply to mine, this will turn into a balance of 0.

     But if someone sends thousands or even millions of spam messages, they have to pay a large price.
     Moderation can be priced as well (even if done by people in their free time) to balance this system. But we have to price this stuff or we’ll drown in spam.

     silverpill repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Phantasm (phnt@fluffytail.org)'s status on Friday, 19-Jun-2026 02:04:02 JST Phantasm

     in reply to
     @Profpatsch
     >In order to combat this, we need to add friction to posting. The most obvious solution here is to add transaction cost in addition to moderation.
     
     No, just no. The obvious solution to the spam problem is moderation and filtering tools that don't suck and are configurable and ideally writeable by the admins. Simple heuristics like mentions spam, keywords, account age at the time of federation and soft/hard limits where posts are hidden/dropped go a long way and are relatively easy to write and configure. The spam problem is bad on Mastodon only because Mastodon refuses to implement actually functional moderation and filtering tools for some reason.
     fedi-mastodon-gold-account.webp
     mastodon-battlepass.jpg