cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/123857
This is my current attempt at preparing to counter the spam waves that will be appearing as the fediverse becomes more and more popular.
It involves the creation of whitelists based on a chain of trust between instances with easy ways to add and remove into it with few overheads.
Let me know what you think and if you’re interested, please do register your instance at https://overctrl.dbzer0.com.
So what happens to instances who don’t want to participate in a centralized allowlisting project? This is an allow list system, so eventually we just get cut out of federation? I’m still wishing for a centralized deny list, that would keep track of instances blocked by other instances, and block someone once maybe 3 other instances I trust do. That way we can still allow by default, rather than requiring that any admin who wants to set up a new system is required to know another admin who will endorse them. Frankly, I don’t have a personal relationship with even a single other fediverse admin; I wouldn’t want to endorse them, because I just don’t know them, and I’m quite sure they also wouldn’t endorse me. But saying “I trust you to block bad instances most of the time” seems way easier than “I trust you to vet all of your users”.
The problem with blacklists is that it’s trivial to make endless domains to spam. The fediverse avoided this by being too small to matter , but as the reddit exodus begins this is about to change
So require paid ssl certificates or something. I just can’t sign on to any system that requires me to establish personal friendships with other instance admins so I can beg them for endorsements. Begging Reddit to improve accessibility didn’t work. I have no interest in a system where my instance now needs to beg other admins for the right to federate. Even email doesn’t work this way.
Email does rely on IP reputation as a major component in deciding if something is spam. The system has matured to a point where it works fairly well and transparently … but the consequence has been you can’t reliably send from an IP block unless somebody is very actively handling abuse and working with the reputation services to keep their IP space in the internet’s good graces.
But: I wouldn’t want to allowlist based just on one reputation service. I’ve got some ideas on how to handle spam for my instances involving a few different datapoints. This could be useful as one, if it ends up with enough data.
So instead of having to “beg for endorsements” you’d rather have to pay to set up a FOSS server?
Yes. I already have to pay for a VPS, for a domain…nothing wrong with paying for an SSL cert. At least I can pick my vendor.
I’m not sure how’d you accomplish this without requiring an EV cert, which is expensive and time-consuming to get, right? I guess manually maintaining a list of free CAs like Let’s Encrypt? Idk, I’d never pay for a cert I’d have to manually update where my LE certs are all automatic.