"The Scale Is Just Unfathomable" by Tarleton Gillespie https://logicmag.io/04-the-scale-is-just-unfathomable/
I'm still interested to see how the fediverse's moderation-per-instance model can really scale. So far it works okay, but I think overall we're still a small community (or a handful of small communities), which makes things easier.
I still haven't reopened registration for toot.cafe, but maybe I should assuming the spambots are gone. I still need to update to the latest version of Mastodon with the email validation stuff though.
@nolan I am curious how helpful piggybacking on the trust of email domains can be with the whitelisting feature. For example, instead of totally shutting down registrations, you could only allow through certain domains. Some instances may be able to sidestep the spam problem entirely with a comprehensive whitelist (e.g. academic instances only let through .edu emails). There are a ton of domains that are known-good (e.g. company domains).
@nolan I think a comprehensive whitelist combined with a verification step for emails from generic hosts (gmail, etc). Could be an alternative to fully stopping registrations. Not sure how supported this is currently.
@freemancw I kinda think that if Mastodon were truly attacked at scale by spammers, most instances would just switch to an invite system. Not sure though; this thing is evolving naturally. :)
Just because the server can support the load doesn't necessarily mean that YOU can.
Don't allow more registrations than you can afford.
@nolan
@nolan I reopened two weeks ago (pre 2.4.1) and didn't see the boys anymore. For what it's worth.
@nolan bots. Not boys. Stupid autocorrect.
@nolan I'm excited for that 2.4.1 goodness
@nick It's a-coming. I'm just lazy and scared. :P
@nolan I just have a handful of active users here. I've had al of one person I needed to suspend so far, and a few external instances to block.
I also keep registration closed at least half the time. I don't NEED to show investors or advertisers a constantly-increasing number of users, so it's easy to keep the population to a level I can manage.
@anthracite Yeah if toot.cafe ever got too big, I would probably shut down registration permanently. I don't want it to be so big that I have to start thinking about how to automate moderation.
@nolan Having decidedly idiosyncratic styling, and responding to requests to change it with "Thanks, I'll look into that the next time I work on the site" (which has not been for like half a year if you ignore me recently having to hose out the foreign media cache when it completely filled the disc) probably helps keep it small, too. Managing this site ain't my day job and I don't WANT it to be my day job.
@nolan I dunno if moderation-per-instane scales, but the centralized moderation model apparently only scales once you allow for the censorship of speech by AI, which is a pretty low bar.
On toot.cafe I basically handle all the moderation myself (we used to have a team of 4, but that was back during the April 2017 wave when things were nuts). So far the workload has been okay: a couple reports per week, mostly for remote accounts.
A couple weekends ago though, there was a huge spam influx that caught me off-gaurd. I had to suspend ~50 accounts, and it was a lot of manual effort. I take my time, since suspending local accounts means those accounts' content is deleted forever.