Sonya MannDoes anyone else find it baffling that there's already SEO spam on here?
Munin@sonya Hey, that means it's a success ;-)
@sonya Spammers are only going to try if they foresee enough ROI to make it worth their while, after all.
@munin in this case I doubt the spammer's judgment... but I suppose we'll see how it goes!
@sonya I tend to doubt the judgement of spammers in general, but they seem to have an idea that it's a good idea.
If they were intelligent at all, they'd spin up their own instances and take advantage of federation so they could fast-flux more effectively to evade blocks.
Andrea@puellavulnerata @sonya Right - just flux the identifier for the instance after sufficient attrition.
bob@munin @sonya @puellavulnerata if that happens servers will probably start adopting spamassassin-style blocklists
@parataxis @puellavulnerata @sonya That would be a start, yes. I would like to see some kind of greylisting [ because that's my thing ] applied, so that newly seen instances' traffic will be delayed or otherwise put under a probation kind of status for a period of time.
@munin @sonya @puellavulnerata or new instances don't show up until/unless someone on your instance reaches out to it (by following or RT-ing someone on that instance)
@parataxis @puellavulnerata @sonya That's comparatively easy to manipulate, if you have a registered 'legit' user on the target instances.
@munin @sonya @puellavulnerata sure. but we've seen that game play out in email, so it's fairly obvious what that escalation would look like
@parataxis @puellavulnerata @sonya Well, yes - that's why nipping it in the bud with effective counter-spam techniques is probably better to implement sooner rather than later. No sense discarding the lessons learned from the last several generations.
@munin @sonya @puellavulnerata IP reputation might work even better for microblog than it does for email because more of the people you want to talk to are on the same server and the cost of blocking inbound from another node is lower. then again it's crappy that everyone has to use SES or mailgun
@parataxis @puellavulnerata @sonya No - IP reputation schemes tend to end up either favoring centralization of resources [which is the opposite of the widely federated goal that would be nice here] or having weaknesses to sibyl networks.
The greylisting approach has had success with email, and can be used in conjunction with other counter-spam measures to mitigate many of these approaches.
There's no single silver bullet for these situations - just measures of varying effects.
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