Nah, bots can farm reputation better than humans can.
The problem is that federation assumes good intent of the admins of other instances. If someone builds a network of instances intended to manipulate votes et cetera, I can’t see how the fediverse could resist that.
Instance A can’t trust that votes from instance B are legit. As soon as there’s no trust then federating even with an aparently trustworthy instance becomes too costly in terms of time and effort.
At the server level we already have that - federating with a server includes that server in the web of trust.
At the user level, how would new users become trusted? That seems unachievable given how difficult it is to attract users just in general without something like that. I’ve been on the fediverse for years but I don’t know any other users that would “trust” me.
I dont think the fediverse will be able to withstand a sophisticated threat in its current form.
Once the number of MAUs makes it worth manipulating, it will be impossible to manage.
There will be a few large well managed instances with no federation, and a disparate assortment of tiny instances with very limited federation.
Agreed. The only reason this is not overrun with spam and bots is because it is small.
A possible solution could be reputation, but that gets dangerously close to Reddit Karma.
Nah, bots can farm reputation better than humans can.
The problem is that federation assumes good intent of the admins of other instances. If someone builds a network of instances intended to manipulate votes et cetera, I can’t see how the fediverse could resist that.
Instance A can’t trust that votes from instance B are legit. As soon as there’s no trust then federating even with an aparently trustworthy instance becomes too costly in terms of time and effort.
I think a some kind of Web of Trust would have to be implemented. Like with GPG decide which servers and users you trust.
I don’t know how that could work.
At the server level we already have that - federating with a server includes that server in the web of trust.
At the user level, how would new users become trusted? That seems unachievable given how difficult it is to attract users just in general without something like that. I’ve been on the fediverse for years but I don’t know any other users that would “trust” me.