@rysiek @pearlbear do you have an idea beyond closed registrations for detecting & handling spam? Because these attacks are constantly evolving, and a lot of people are working hard to fight back the attacks & fix federations to propagate suspensions quicker too — defederating can't be the answer because then the attacks will just move to other instances.
@thisismissem let's start with closed registrations on the biggest instance out there, which happened to be the source of three major spam attacks over the last 10 days.
I'd like to see a fedi where the biggest instance is no larger than 5% of the active accounts; m.s currently is at ~13%. That's simply dangerous.
Defederation is not the solution, but it is sometimes necessary with badly moderated instances.
@rysiek @thisismissem @pearlbear It's not dangerous: While there are a lot of accounts in number, there are very few in influence. Most community members are elsewhere. Raw numbers is far from a useful measure, especially when a lot of them are bots.
@ocdtrekkie I disagree as I have seen it before:
https://rys.io/en/168.html
@rysiek @thisismissem @pearlbear We are so far from having a monoculture problem it isn't even funny. There's two healthy forks of Mastodon, and multiple entirely different breeds of software such as Misskey, Pleroma, and their related forks. And literally dozens of clients.
People taking alarmist positions about mastodon.social are being hostile for the sake of hostility.
@ocdtrekkie if you want to say that I am "being hostile for the sake of hostility", just go on and say it, don't hide behind "people taking alarmist positions".
You are entitled to see what I say this way. I am allowed to draw analogies with a very similar network that had a very similar active accounts distribution, and then got almost killed by the flagship instance removing itself from the equation.
We don't have to agree, and at this point I don't think we will.
@rysiek @ocdtrekkie @pearlbear I'm almost certain that m.s ain't going anywhere anytime soon, and there's definitely no plans to drop activitypub (because that'd be very silly)
But still, even if m.s disappeared overnight, that still leaves >85% of the fediverse intact, which certainly shouldn't be a death knell.
@thisismissem I was so certain identi.ca was not going anywhere that I quit cold turkey about 7mo before identi.ca got pump-io'd.
> But still, even if m.s disappeared overnight, that still leaves >85% of the fediverse intact
How many of these 85% of accounts have important contacts on m.s? Identipocalypse also left ~90% of the network intact, and yet most people who remember this remember it as a calamity for the network.
@rysiek @thisismissem @pearlbear What major contacts on m.s? The most notable account besides the admin just migrated off it.
@ocdtrekkie dunno maybe this guy for example:
https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself
I'm sure you can find more if you choose to look.
@rysiek @ocdtrekkie @pearlbear he's not exactly that active: 4d, 12d, etc.. but also, would you want an account like that on a smaller instance?
@thisismissem the question was about major contacts. That's one of them.
Are you guys trying to make me iterate through all ~220k+ active accounts on m.s to show that there are reasons to worry? Because that does not strike me as a useful way to talk about this.
@rysiek @thisismissem @pearlbear I am sure there would be *some* impact, but I just don't think there would be much. A few folks would migrate somewhere else ahead of time, and carry their followers with them automatically. A lot of bot accounts would get deleted. Not too much else.
@ocdtrekkie cool, thank you for sharing your appraisal of the situation. I acknowledge that you disagree with my appraisal of the situation. And that you will not agree with my conclusions.
@ssundell @rysiek @ocdtrekkie @pearlbear alternatively, celebrities have the funds to help support server upkeep, which could hugely help with keeping the fediverse sustainable
@rysiek @ocdtrekkie @pearlbear I think that's saying a lot more about the community that existed on identi.ca than anything else.
I'm fairly sure majority of my following is on my instance, i.e., local, not that I've done an analysis or anything.
I think we under estimate how federated the network really is. The current user counts from Mastodon *include* accounts that have been migrated, which means, for instance, that I count as an m.s user when I'm actually on Hachyderm.io
@thisismissem are you talking about monthly active accounts? Because that's what I've been talking about all this time. And the current MAU count on m.s is ~220k.
So *again* I would like to see numbers on how many accounts get migrated daily compared to new signups.
That said, I agree fedi is much, much more resilient than "OStatus-verse" ever was. My point is: I intend to keep it that way.
@rysiek @thisismissem @pearlbear If mastodon.social went away (very unlikely), pretty much the entirety of the community would be wholly unaffected.
I referred to a group of people because it is not unique to you, but I am mostly tired of it. Again, it's not even remotely close to being a real problem.
> If mastodon.social went away (very unlikely), pretty much the entirety of the community would be wholly unaffected.
And again, I lived through an event like that, and it absolutely affected people all around.
We will not agree. You flat-out refuse to accept my personal experience with a similar situation.
@rysiek @pearlbear you're saying it's badly moderated, but the team responds to spam attacks rapidly. Like: https://status.mastodon.social/clhnoix2093310j1mzyyinu5bo
Sure, m.s being the biggest instance isn't fantastic, but I suspect the stats are actually misleading here as it's including migrated accounts (i.e., accounts that are no longer on m.s): https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/presenters/instance_presenter.rb#L54
@thisismissem I hope you're right on both counts. I would like to see specific stats of how many people migrate away from m.s daily, compared to how many daily new accounts get created though.