endor5639's comments

I'm talking more about instance operators. Using an email analogy it's more like running an equivalent of gmail/yahoo mail/fastmail. There's this second order of magnitude on the problem because you're responsible for all of the touch points on all of your users in aggregate. Spam lists and block lists on the fediverse are a thing, but they're just step one of a marathon battle against fediverse spam/illicit content. Most instances are very scrappy operations and spam/block lists only put a dent in a very large and often overwhelming issue.

Working dynamic spam/block list solutions at scale that are capable enough to actually erase the issue are a hand wavey future potential solution, whereas the tidal wave of content exceeding the ability of instance owners to moderate is a very real very today problem.

I think what's actually happening on the ground is instance owners slap on some instance block list of the worst offenders and turn a blind eye hoping there's nothing too bad hidden in the mountain of media they have cached, or they just hope nobody starts caring enough to look. That might work fine for a while but I don't think this problem is going away.

This is the part that never made sense to me. The way mastodon is built the server automatically downloads all content you federate with to your own server. That means if someone on your instance hits follow on any account, boom you're now legally responsible for hosting and disseminating everything that account posts. It's just not practical to moderate every post from every account anyone on your server follows. Even one seriously egregious image squeaks through and you're looking at the possibility of actual jail time.

I always wondered if the expectation could be flipped to expect the frontend client to fetch the majority of content remotely from the followees' servers on the fly. The architecture is so complex in a federated scenario though that could be a total mess or not even technically feasible at all.

This also comes in a tenkeyless mini variant

The Microsoft sculpt keyboard is their wireless ergo model