meta, long
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
Back in The Day, there was only one Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. We referred to it as "IRC" because beyond a few small independent servers there was only one network, run by volunteers. Wikipedia says it was called Anarchy Net by some people. To join a server to the IRC network, one convinced the admin of an existing server to allow connection.
meta, long
This worked for years, until eris.berkeley.edu altered their server's configuration to allow *anyone* to hook up a server. No restrictions, no passwords, and no limit on the number of connections. This attracted a huge-for-the-time number of bad actors, filling the network with spam and hackery. Eventually, Eris was silenced/quarantined by most hub servers. These formed Eris-Free Net, or EFnet. A-Net whithered away into irrelevance, and EFnet became the primary IRC network.
meta, long
IRC networks are now typically structured as collectives that carefully manage who is allowed to be a server on their network. Each network has a governing body, agreement on rules, and cooperative participation.
meta, long
Today, the larger Mastodon instances are all Eris. Their moderation teams are much smaller than their userbase. Perhaps there should have been user limits from the start - a minimum ratio of moderators to users - but that didn't happen and now they are overwhelmed. People are already talking about defederating from the larger instances.
meta, long
The Fediverse's safety has revolved around its unprofitability, but that is changing fast. The rapid collapse of Twitter continues to flood the Fediverse with new users, and extractive forces are going to see new opportunities. As soon as the prospect of automated money gets involved, the stakes become huge. The Fediverse is going to see attacks like it has never seen.
meta, long
Hundreds of bad-actor instances, followed by thousands of users on your server, solely for the purpose of provoking federation. Millions of automated account reports. The troll machine has barely gotten started, and while Fedi successfully repelled the amateurs, I don't think it can withstand professional attack. Anyone with sufficient money can easily overwhelm the whole thing due to its openness.
meta, long
Eventually, soon, the Fediverse will need to become default-closed, electing to only federate with vetted instances. We should prepare. It should be possible to pull an allow-list from a centralized point, forming a cluster of broad agreement. I think it will still be different from the IRC networks - instances could be part of more than one cluster, for instance - but our days of trusting all comers are limited. We should imagine what we want before we're forced to respond.
fa'o
re: meta, long
@dl While I do think it is important to be prepared for such a situation, it is also very dangerous to just assume as a fact that that *will* be the situation, and moreso to state it as such.
What breaks loosely organized structures isn't abuse itself, but a loss of trust in the structure's ability to deal with it. Declaring it impossible to do so upfront just makes that failure mode *more likely* to occur.
Losing the openness should be the absolute last resort. It is an option that should be on the table, but *only* after every other possible solution has been eliminated, including (particularly!) the ones that might seem unlikely to work because of (frequently misguided) beliefs about "human nature".
