How is this news?
It's literally a blog post.
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.
I fear if these federated systems do grow popular enough
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.
email spam is the original spam
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.
- 1985: "spamming" on MUDs meant sending junk messages to disrupt a roleplaying session, originally from a player doing this with the text of the Monty Python "Spam" sketch.
- 1991: When a Usenet modbot had a bug that caused it to repeatedly post the same message, a Usenet admin who was also a MUD player referred to this as "spamming" Usenet. The term caught on to mean "excessive multiple posting", regardless of content; most early Usenet spams were religious proselytization or political kookery.
- 1994: Lawyers Canter & Siegel post the first major commercial Usenet spam. They go on to write a book promoting Usenet and email spamming as a business tactic. At this point, "spamming" starts to be used to refer to inappropriate commercial posting, regardless of volume.
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(who’s account isn’t banned within a few hours),
Whose
And that's where I stopped.
I look at that as as proof it wasn't written by GPT.