Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@discordiankitty@mastodon.me.uk I think that will depend a lot on exactly *how* it grows. There have been many new folks suggesting to basically implement Twitter algorithms, full-text search, more large centralized instances, and so on - if that happens, then yes, moderation will break down, because those are precisely the things that make Twitter a hotbed of abuse (https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_better_without/ is a good read).

But if the fundamental structure of the network remains the same, and just the amount of instances and people increases, then I think it would hold up fine. The "you only see a part of the network from any given vantage point" property is a very powerful defense here against scalability-related moderation issues.

That having been said, it also depends on how individual instances deal with the influx of new users. I've certainly seen a lot of instances struggle with conveying the culture to such large amounts of newcomers at once, especially around things like CWs and image alt texts. That is also a potential failure point, even if only temporarily.

@musicmatze@social.linux.pizza Huh?

@discordiankitty@mastodon.me.uk So there's two components to this, really:

1. This is just a fundamental technical limitation of any federated system, it's the same limitation that eg. e-mail has. This just isn't possible to solve (at least in the way you're looking for) without a centrally-arbitrated 'identity registry', which has a whole host of its own fundamental issues.
2. Another way to look at it, is that the server name is *part of* the username. It's true that people often move servers, but at the same time that leaves behind an account-move notice on the old identity, so it should still be just as verifiable as if the account hadn't moved.

While it's certainly true that there could be better verification mechanisms (eg. keybase-like mechanisms), it's also important to realize that this impersonation issue isn't actually specific to the fediverse or even federated systems in general; for example, on Twitter, there has likewise been a long-standing and widespread impersonation issue that wasn't solved by centralized handles either.

If anything, while the verification is still imperfect, the fediverse currently deals with this slightly *better* than Twitter; because there's actually an active mod response here, and malicious accounts will either disappear quickly, or instances that deliberately originate them will be quickly blocked by other instances. Twitter doesn't even have that :/

@schmittlauch It's surprisingly safely implemented - if there are multiple packages offering the same binary name then it'll make you choose one first, and it only fetches packages from nixpkgs, which has at least had nominal review :)

(So basically, it avoids the two biggest security issues that eg. npx has)

@drifa If there's one thing I've learned over the past few days, it's that with some people over on Twitter who complain that "Mastodon can't replace Twitter", it's probably better for everybody involved that they don't come over to the fediverse...

@jfhbrook That's mostly just things being slow because the userbase size tripled overnight without a corresponding growth in instances :p

@aeva Oh no, I was criticizing tendencies of programmers, not your toot :)

@aeva That programmers are often elitist by assuming they are linearly more intelligent than everybody else, and believing that they can speak for everybody else, and therefore anything that bothers them must bother everyone else too