My interpretation of the mastodon.social spam wave and ensuing discussion about the admin and moderation work it puts on other servers and whether or not to defederate mastodon.social: a clear sign that main instances are generally too big in comparative terms. Large (relative) size gives you all the hassle of centralised silo’s and none of the perks of federation. Like silos the cost of it gets mostly externalised, but that means externalised to the wider federated network you see a part of your community. Mastodon needs to get its long tail in much better order. That way your big neighbour will be smaller and less noisy because of it, or at least easier to attenuate.
@ton I heartily disagree. The only thing the #spam waves are proving, is that #Mastodon isn’t hardenized against it, and it should prioritize that. As soon as the spammers spread out and send their spam trough multiple smaller #instances (less actively moderated and/or no team to deal with it), the problem will be much bigger: – waves continue longer until stopped- those instances aren’t to big to miss, therefore blocked, breaking #federation for the wrong reason.
federation
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spam