this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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If you've ever hosted a potluck and none of the guests were shilling junk products, congratulations! You've achieved what some of the most valuable companies in the world claim is impossible.
Nobody thinks big tech companies are OK with spammers just because their moderation of spam is imperfect. At the very least, they want people shilling junk on their platforms to pay for ads, yet none of the big platforms are spam-free. Federated systems aren't inherently immune to abuse; email spam is the original spam. Similarly, the presence of Nazis on the biggest platforms doesn't imply that the owners of those platforms are happy to have them.
Everybody with some crap to push, whether it's commercial spam or Nazi ideology has reason to look for the biggest audience with the least effort. Most of them aren't going to waste their efforts targeting Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix or the like right now. I fear if these federated systems do grow popular enough the existing moderation tools will be woefully inadequate and most servers will switch to a whitelist model.
It's not like they're like, "yay Nazis!", but their business model necessitates being extremely permissive. More eyeballs means more money.
Fediverse admins and mods don't have any other goal beyond protecting their communities. It's why corporate social, even before Elon took over Twitter, was crawling with suit Nazi alt-right accounts dog whistling their Nazi bullshit. Also why Eugen Rochko could famously say "that bullshit doesn't work on me man" when offered a typical argument justifying the existence of those accounts.
More people here may draw more attention from Nazis, but it wouldn't change the interests of admins/mods. More eyeballs doesn't mean more money here. And shitty users means both unhappy communities and much more work for mods. There's just no incentive to put up with it.
Very well said all around, (and in many fewer words than it took me) I may actually quote you in the future! Hadn't seen that 2018(!) Esquire article before today either. Kind of sad "Twitter without Nazis" wasn't a more compelling selling point. Just speaks to the power of network effects, I suppose.
If an instance did grow "too big to moderate", it would surely be defederated from, yeah? I'm struggling to think of a situation where responsible admins from well-moderated instances would willingly subject their users to spammers from an instance (no matter how big) that can't control itself.
While it's true that there was occasional commercial misuse of email in the ARPANET days (when commercial use was against the rules of the military-funded research network), it wasn't called "spam" then.
Until the mid-1990s, "spamming" typically meant sending repetitious messages rather than inappropriate commercial messages. It wasn't about what you said, but about how many times you said it. The transition from one meaning to the other mostly happened on Usenet, as commercial abusers took advantage of typically-lax moderation policies to repeatedly post unsolicited advertisements. Major commercial email spam was a branch off of Usenet spam operations.