It’s a major hole with regards to spam, but in a hypothetical whistleblower scenario it makes it hard for a single entity to silence and remove all evidence.
There are simply trade offs, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.
Given the nature of the internet, I feel that spam is a much bigger problem than a potential whistleblower being silenced, and wouldn’t that kind of action show up in the logs anyways?
It’s a major hole with regards to spam, but in a hypothetical whistleblower scenario it makes it hard for a single entity to silence and remove all evidence.
There are simply trade offs, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.
Given the nature of the internet, I feel that spam is a much bigger problem than a potential whistleblower being silenced, and wouldn’t that kind of action show up in the logs anyways?
As a former admin, I guarantee no one seriously reads those logs outside of happenstance. It takes the users speaking up to warrant that.
The whistleblower can read (or ask someone to read) the logs and find out who silenced them, then whistleblow that/get get whoever did it defederated.
Deleting spam isn’t optional. If you leave it there your community is dead.
What I meant with whistleblowing in terms of the fediverse is:
Whistleblower posts to instance A, and it gets mirrored on instance B.
Someone like Musk erases the post on instance A.
As the Fediverse currently works, the whistleblowing still exists on instance B, and cannot be deleted by an admin on instance A.
Asking a Musk to divulge who did the silencing is an exercise in futility.
That said, I’m totally on board with better tools to handle spam.
@Crankpork @Wooster I agree. Spam can get a community killed. For example because instances begin to defederate in response to spam.