While selfhosting email in the low-level sense of your own VPS and installing your own mail server software is frustrating today, I find this is relatively rare. More common (besides personal Fastmail/Hotmail/Gmail) is to own your own domain but pay a webhost. E.g. Fastmail or Google Workspace with custom domain, or a webhost like Hover, Gandi, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc.
This benefits from a larger-scale spam filter, whilst also having complete autonomy over who uses it and what they use it for, plus the ability to transparently move providers if you wish, plus the freedom to pick your email client (eg. Thunderbird with full and offline copy of your data), plus it has resulted in thousands of large domestic webhosts around the globe, not a handful of international ones only.
It’s not as decentralised as everyone managing their own software packages on a Rasberry Pi buried in their backyard, but it certainly allows anyone to do that if they want...
To draw the analogy with Mastodon, I could see us avoiding having only a few big Mastodon sites plus some self-hosted ActivityPub sites if we lean into the web hosting model. There are already major players like Masto.host, who could eg. offer centralised anti-spam measures in the future.
Anti-spam could also be decoupled from hosting, such as the case with blogs. E.g. you can self-host WordPress, or choose a professional WordPress hoster. The later is still orders of magnitudes more decentralised than everyone on WordPress.com, and anti-spam can be offered by the hoster, or through a plugin like Akismet that contacts a differerent shared service for that of your choosing.
Mastodon already supports relays and webhooks that are being used to share block lists between like-minded instances, allowing you to be closely integrated with a community (including populating eachothers federated timeline) whilst still being hosted separately.
I dunno about the e-mail/web hosting analogy, at least for the purposes of thinking about possible anti-spam approaches. As I understand it, the current state of Mastodon hosting is much more like the WordPress hosting example than the e-mail hosting example, in that each customer gets their own isolated instance of the software for their domain. I think a lot of the ability to achieve larger scale spam filters and etc on email hosts comes from the fact that the actual infrastructure is shared. E.g. my impression has generally been that separate Akismet-style anti-spam services has been more successful in the WordPress context than hosting-linked solutions, and that hosting-linked solutions are generally similarly implemented as plugins anyway rather than being built into the infrastructure in some deeper way. (But it’s entirely possible that I’m behind the times on that front?) In that case, there’s nothing special about the hosting provider being the same that enables anti-spam — it’s all about creating coordination systems that are trusted by many instances and thus re-create centralized decision-making for the spam-specific slice of the content moderation problem.
the entire spam problem comes from the underlying desire to see content you didn’t have to explicitly find and request. e-mail spam is because you WANT to receive e-mail from some strangers, and it’s hard to distinguish that from strangers you’d rather not hear from. Twitter/social spam is because you WANT to see some posts from people you didn’t explicitly follow, by tags or by topic.
I think I mostly don’t understand the lines of federation within Mastodon. Is it intended that the server is the unit of community, with cross-server DMs and following, but only by individual, not by topic or thread?
While selfhosting email in the low-level sense of your own VPS and installing your own mail server software is frustrating today, I find this is relatively rare. More common (besides personal Fastmail/Hotmail/Gmail) is to own your own domain but pay a webhost. E.g. Fastmail or Google Workspace with custom domain, or a webhost like Hover, Gandi, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc.
This benefits from a larger-scale spam filter, whilst also having complete autonomy over who uses it and what they use it for, plus the ability to transparently move providers if you wish, plus the freedom to pick your email client (eg. Thunderbird with full and offline copy of your data), plus it has resulted in thousands of large domestic webhosts around the globe, not a handful of international ones only.
It’s not as decentralised as everyone managing their own software packages on a Rasberry Pi buried in their backyard, but it certainly allows anyone to do that if they want...
To draw the analogy with Mastodon, I could see us avoiding having only a few big Mastodon sites plus some self-hosted ActivityPub sites if we lean into the web hosting model. There are already major players like Masto.host, who could eg. offer centralised anti-spam measures in the future.
Anti-spam could also be decoupled from hosting, such as the case with blogs. E.g. you can self-host WordPress, or choose a professional WordPress hoster. The later is still orders of magnitudes more decentralised than everyone on WordPress.com, and anti-spam can be offered by the hoster, or through a plugin like Akismet that contacts a differerent shared service for that of your choosing.
Mastodon already supports relays and webhooks that are being used to share block lists between like-minded instances, allowing you to be closely integrated with a community (including populating eachothers federated timeline) whilst still being hosted separately.
I dunno about the e-mail/web hosting analogy, at least for the purposes of thinking about possible anti-spam approaches. As I understand it, the current state of Mastodon hosting is much more like the WordPress hosting example than the e-mail hosting example, in that each customer gets their own isolated instance of the software for their domain. I think a lot of the ability to achieve larger scale spam filters and etc on email hosts comes from the fact that the actual infrastructure is shared. E.g. my impression has generally been that separate Akismet-style anti-spam services has been more successful in the WordPress context than hosting-linked solutions, and that hosting-linked solutions are generally similarly implemented as plugins anyway rather than being built into the infrastructure in some deeper way. (But it’s entirely possible that I’m behind the times on that front?) In that case, there’s nothing special about the hosting provider being the same that enables anti-spam — it’s all about creating coordination systems that are trusted by many instances and thus re-create centralized decision-making for the spam-specific slice of the content moderation problem.
the entire spam problem comes from the underlying desire to see content you didn’t have to explicitly find and request. e-mail spam is because you WANT to receive e-mail from some strangers, and it’s hard to distinguish that from strangers you’d rather not hear from. Twitter/social spam is because you WANT to see some posts from people you didn’t explicitly follow, by tags or by topic.
I think I mostly don’t understand the lines of federation within Mastodon. Is it intended that the server is the unit of community, with cross-server DMs and following, but only by individual, not by topic or thread?