It looks like a new spamming tactic will be to set up your own instance and then just mass spam to other instances from there. Case in point, vive.im I’ve been noticing spam in one magazine from a user of this. I banned them, but they can still post for some reason. Decided to visit the instance and it looks like some default front page with ‘3’ active users. If you look at the user’s account on there they’ve made 12k posts already and seem to have a script set up to push their blogspam 3-4 times per minute.
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We need a clear process to report and get these kinds of things removed quickly.
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Bans need to work properly and stop these users from posting.
I’m inclined to say I’m not a fan of my idea on a philosophical level, but we can’t ignore the practical considerations here either. Endlessly banning spam instances is not going to be fun and takes away time and effort on the admin’s part that could be better spent on useful things. A site clogged by spam is also not going to be useful, in which case it doesn’t matter how well you adhered to your principles.
These interests are competing, but I think there’s a compromise to be found. I’m going to suggest rate limiting for new instances until they’ve produced a certain amount of content (so say until they’ve produced X comments+links with a minimum Y days), plus a system that automagically puts new instances in the timeout box if enough users report their content. Admins can manually skip the warm up period for new instances, and also review the timeout box to see if it’s actually a concern.
I think Lemmy may be doing something similar, actually. At least, I’ve noticed that smaller instances don’t seem to be federating nearly as well as larger instances. Obviously Mastodon have figured out a way around this as well, so it’s clearly doable.