Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
We had a bunch of Japanese teenagers run scripts on their computers and half the Fediverse was full of spam. If someone really cared about spamming, this shit wouldn’t stop as quickly.
No Fediverse tools have sufficient spam prevention measures right now. The best we have is individually blocking every server, but there are thousands of servers that can be abused by a very basic account creation + spam script.
Manal moderation will lead to small/single user instances getting barred from participating, leading back to centralisation on a few vetted servers. We need automated tools, across all parts of the Fediverse, or the network will be in a constant flux between waves of spam and overbearing defederation to fight the spam waves. Especially once spammers start bypassing CAPTCHAs.
The upside of that attack is that instance Admins had to raise their game and now most of the big instances are running anti-spam bots and sharing intelligence. Next time we’ll be able to move quickly and shut it all down, where this time we were rather scrambling to catch up. Then the spammers will evolve their attack and we’ll raise our game again.
It’s true that the toolset isn’t here now, and the network is actually very fragile at the moment.
It’s also true that platform builders don’t seem to want to deal with these kinds of tools, for raisins.
But it’s also true that temporary blocks are both effective and not that big of a deal.
I’m not sure why you’d think that manual moderation will lead to small instances getting barred, though. Unless you’re predicting that federation will move to whitelisting, rather than blacklisting? That’s historically been the tool of corporate services, not personal or community ones.