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Larry Garfield

@ryanc @jerry The spam analogy is very apt, I think, given Fediverse is often analogized to email.

And the wild-west-anyone-runs-anything approach is largely a failure there, too. I also used to run a personal mail server. It only worked if I proxied every message through my ISP's mail server.

A similar network-of-trust seems the only option here, give or take details.

7 comments
Larry Garfield

@ryanc @jerry In the abstract sense, we're dealing with the scaling problems of the tit-for-tat experiment dynamics. Reputation-building approaches to social behavior only work when the # of actors is small enough that repeated interactions can build reputation. The Internet is vastly too big for that, just like society at large.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry there's several phd thesis level problems to solve here

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry My big concern with the web of trust model is that it's complicated, and has lots of nontrivial decisions to make. An effective tool would probably have to distill the decision to trust/neutral/distrust and have a standard scoring algorithm, and notify admins of conflicting data.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Crell @jerry I do think keyword/regex filters as a quarantine/alert admin thing would be helpful, but as mentioned up thread, part of the problem is people unkowingly joining instances that don't protect their users from harassment and not understanding why that's a problem. The guides saying "instance doesn't matter much" don't help.

Larry Garfield replied to Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@ryanc @jerry Yeah, the onboarding experience is definitely still a sore point. Like, I'd like to get my brother or the NFP I work with onto Mastodon, but I don't know what server to send them to. Mine isn't appropriate for them, mastodon.social isn't a good answer, and the alternative is... *citation needed*

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag: replied to Larry

@Crell @jerry Yeah, I've absolutely no idea what "general but friendly to members of frequently harassed groups" instances exist. This instance is really nice, as I've always been a hacker first and foremost. Yes, I'm queer on several dimensions and open about it, but most of the time I don't want to focus on that.

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