We could eliminate most fediverse spam with sms registration at the expense of early adopters who disproportionately despise it.
Do we sacrifice growth for "UX" or take advantage of established anti-spam measures?
This is the million dollar question for every #activityPub project. What do you think? #fediverse #spam
@dansup I’m on a server of three people, and I’m really curious about this fediverse spam thing.. what is it and can you not just block the instance it’s coming from? I do not get spam on mastodon. Occasionally there’s a toxic user, but I just block them or their instance, depending, and it’s rare enough that it’s a surprise when it happens.
@jaz @dansup I think the problem here is having open registration. I'm a strong believer in @darius 's principle of small servers of no more than ~50 people, where the admin knows everyone. If a user knows the admin irl they're far less likely to engage in antisocial behavior on the instance, which makes things nicer for the whole fediverse. Personally I wouldn't define any instance with open registrations as "small". https://runyourown.social/#keep-it-small
@holly @dansup @darius I think there a multiple use cases at work. Small instances where it's a tight-knit group or family is one of them. Topical, regional servers, these are intended to welcome folks who the admin does not know, but want to join with people who share interests, location, lifestyles, for some these servers open registration is a must. Then there's the flagship large generic servers, which have a whole different approach. As with most things, there is no single correct answer.
@holly @dansup this is about spam registations, people sign up, load up their profile with links to ads or malicious sites etc., post once, then leave. When I wake up, about half an hour of my morning is cleaning these out. I have a second check later in the day. It's 90 percent of registration.
The current answer is to manually approve ALL registrations, which slows down/deters onboarding for any actual, honest registrations, which IMO is too high a price to pay (esp for small servers)