But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam.
To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off your instance from certain parts of the world.
My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.
And ontop of that more ActivityPub relays to facilitate federation.
> My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.
This would be great to stop the American-influence dominating every conversation like happens on Reddit, etc.
While English is the majority by server stats, there are plenty in other languages. You can filter out English toots. The filter isn't perfect, but it works well enough.
> To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
I really like the way social.coop, a cooperatively run instance, handles this. Because we're all just pooling a little bit of money (1GBP/yr for most people) we can run a service cheaper than we could run it ourselves if we're renting a VPS and there are enough people interested to create a rotating moderation team, so we rarely get too much spam from other instances. So far a cooperative model has worked very well for us; no donations required, just splitting up costs in the cheapest possible way so that no one gets burned out or feels like their money is carrying the instance!
But I have had many experiences with various voluntary organisations over the years. Hacker spaces, maker spaces, activist groups and online groups.
Maintaining a group is hard work and it requires someone to care about the end goal. And if that one fire brand gives up someone has to take their place.
So in the long run most of my experiences with such organisations have ended on a sad note. And especially when it comes to the Fediverse I'd say 99.99% of my users just want to try it out and see if it ever goes anywhere.
At the moment it's all coming from my pocket because I love the work and I love the idea. And at the moment it's not that much, just maybe 80 euros a month.
I feel like local governments running some sort of federated network like that would be really cool, and could reduce some of the political influence twitter has. How local "local" is could be anything from a city to state/province to country-wide. Unfortunately, I think it would require centralized or federated identity management which is pretty complex, especially at a government level.
> The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
Yup! That's exactly the approach Kazemi is advocating, too. It makes sense if you think about the trust that there needs to be both ways in a admin/account-holder relationship.
But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam.
To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off your instance from certain parts of the world.
My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.
And ontop of that more ActivityPub relays to facilitate federation.