Notices by Beady Belle Fanchannel (profpatsch@mastodon.xyz)

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

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.

@grindhold @silverpill @sabrinkmann I think we should at least use a system that’s somewhat resistant to semantic overload, like CSS vendor prefixes.

e.g. add "flohmarkt:foobar" as a new field, and when it receives an FEP you can drop the prefix. So “on the edge” software can start by using the prefixed field, and then slowly migrate to unprefixed FEP once that’s there.

@silverpill @sabrinkmann @grindhold Why would anybody do that?

@silverpill @sabrinkmann @grindhold Why does it have the same downsides? It makes people actually able to remember them and typing words is easier than typing arbitrary hex (plus it’s harder to typo)

@silverpill

Unrelated: can I lobby you to change FEP names to FEP-human-understandable-shortcut and have the ID just as unique identifier? :)

It’s basically impossible to talk about FEPs with their current hex codes

@sabrinkmann @grindhold

@silverpill

e.g. FEP-federated-marketplace instead of FEP-0837

@sabrinkmann @grindhold

@silverpill @sabrinkmann @grindhold I guess that’s possible, but it will really blow up the size of objects after a certain point (e.g. if you want to support multiple representations) and makes Type completely useless … plus e.g. if you want to add attachments that mastodon does not understand, you simply cannot.

@sabrinkmann @silverpill @grindhold At one point we should think about whether we want AP-based “content negotiation”, i.e. “I support FEP-xxxx, you can send me something of type Foo instead of a Note”.

But maybe that’s a horrible idea because it would make debugging anything even more hell than it already is

@datenwolf @dalias @aeva would you go clean streets if they offered you money for that instead? I guess the amount is not relevant because everybody who makes food just does it cause they want to

@mbajur I think we are trying to standardize instance actors in an FEP, but I haven't heard of pure domain actor names

Edit: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-2677-identifying-the-application-actor/3646

@mbajur maybe what you could try to do is serve your actor activity JSON from root, but I'd wager most webfinger implementations reject handles with an empty user part

@mbajur it's also kind of hard to parse cleanly and securely because Mastodon uses @user@example.com and others user@example.com, so hard to distinguish what's domain and what @ you can ignore …

@mbajur Ah yes, I’ve seen many people with single-user instances use something like @me@named.domain, which is super unfortunate because quoting them will show “@me”.

I think what you want to do has a lot of value here … so I guess the steps are:

1) implement webfinger to resolve @domain to the one actor, and @user@domain to point *to the same actor* (so you can mention them on platforms that don’t yet implement the new style quotes)
2) Publish an FEP about this new webfinger extension

@mbajur I’m just a little afraid of the case where you are replying to a toot that uses @domain nicks, because it might happen that they are dropped

It would be interesting to test whether mastodon links to people in replies by their href already, or whether it tries to do (cached) webfinger again when you hit reply, because if they use the href from the previous toot it could already work in replies.

@mbajur The other problem, as you can see above with @me is that if mastodon finds a nick on the local server, they will link it automatically, though I think you could argue that this is a misfeature from past times (it does not even open a dropdown)

@mbajur cc @silverpill

@jdlh @hongminhee @liaizon @Edent @north

Oh yeah, definitely I only do the validation on username selection, not when e.g. logging in a user or resolving webfinger.

But PRECIS is … precisely such a specification. Maybe not the best way to do it, I think @aumetra has a different approach based on unicode classes or something

@NeonPurpleStar I did not even know about this until now so I guess I'm on a successful trajectory

your daily dose of json+ld, #fedidev