this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Some risk will be necessary. At some level we do have to let small instances with minuscule communities exist and participate in the wider fediverse, otherwise this whole thing will just fiat centralize.
The cautionary tale is email. In a way, Email is the most successful decentralized protocol. Anyone can technically throw up a client and start communicating with any other email server. The problem of course, is that if you do this in practice, your email will almost never get through to the majority of people. Why? Most of the large providers of email have formed what amounts to a whitelist of trust, and either outright reject participants they don't recognize, or subject those outside participants to incredibly high standards that they themselves to not have to abide by.
So, email has practically become a centralized affair controlled by a few big stakeholders. A lot of small email providers have gotten out of the game in the last decade because they're tired of dealing with it. It's a mess.
I'm not against greater tools, but I'd inject that health is not solely measured by the lack of spam. A spam-free fediverse that's just one instance and its three closest friends is not healthy. Whatever solutions are developed should leave open the door for small instances to still participate and have a honest chance at survival.
Thank you for eloquently putting something that I have been struggling to put into words. I really hope that the big instances don't all end up moving to a whitelist federation model, the ability to have my own instance, with the ability to interact with any community in the fediverse, is what brought me here.
That said, a lot work needs to go into making this platform more resilient against spam bots. The biggest problem I see is that the default instance settings aren't resistant at all. It seems to me that it shouldn't even be possible to deploy a lemmy instance with no email verification, no captcha, and open sign-ups, but here we are.
Perhaps some sort of sanity check in lemmy that disables federation in that case might be a good idea. If someone is competent enough to implement their own spam protection beyond those, they're probably competent enough to fork lemmy and disable said sanity check
The email comparison is pretty apt. I think one of the things they eventually had to deal with was reputation of different entities. Right now it's essentially a boolean situation for the various server admins to identify things that could cause trouble and take preventative steps of blocking or not blocking them.
We would need to answer so e questions around how to quantify what good behavior looks like in lemmy that aren't trivial to game/bypass.