The Architecture

#author_luna #spam #artificial_intelligence #large_language_models

this is a copy-paste of a long thread i wrote up on fedi mid december 2023. thought it had enough power to be its own article

the more i look at spam the more i look at The Architecture i cooked up in july

not sure what to do about that feeling

gitdab.com is a spam target, neither of us can keep up with it because we have things to do and places to be

we attempted recaptcha, and hcaptcha, both can be just paid for.

the solution is slowly becoming "close off all public registrations, use friend-of-friend (somehow) to let people through". lobste.rs does this, a3.pm does this, elixi.re does this

even then, friend-of-friend is heavily manual unless the software is made for it, and most software isn't (a3.pm and elixi.re are manual)

what to do, then?

fedi is a whole different beast, all that i said only apply to centralized platforms. fedi is not centralized and a spammer or bad actor requires hashtags like fediblock and word of mouth from people to people to get them shutdown from the network. this is not scalable, but you could argue that's a property of fedi that you can't remove.

email has spam issues, that has to be an automated filter. it's how we only got like 3 main email providers, a bunch of small scale ones, and you are reputation'd out if you try to start on the system with your own ip

fedi has small scale spam issues, of whose filtering is not automated yet, but what happens in the future where threads dot net goes widespread? more eyes on the network, more people, more spam targets.

it's sort of why i look at The Architecture (mentioned above). automated individual filtering system for massive information flows. the first application is arxiv papers, but you could generalize to any low signal-to-noise ratio flow

here's another "anti-spam" measure that doesn't work nowadays: i just got another spam/phishing scheme on whatsapp.

y'know, the messaging app that requires you to have a phone number, to prove you're a real entity. what am i supposed to do? report as spam, and wait for the next phone number to appear on my phone.

at this rate, i don't think any "proof of humanity" system (hcaptcha, recaptcha, privacy pass, worldcoin), or manual moderation system, can work in an increasing spam-ful future that spreads beyond email (fedi, whatsapp, discord*, youtube).

in a way, twitter's move to lock all dms for premium users only on its spampocalypse was the option they had to make, because scaling up the moderation team would've been an increasing battle of costs between attack and defense, and its likely twitter was not profitable back then (and likely still isn't yet, elon is trying hard tho, and likely succeeding)

you can't even waste these people's time anymore like it was with a proper phone call. it's all over text, they have preconfigured response trees for the attack

on an earlier subthread, i wrote more things about The Architecture, here are they and some more, condensed into the main thread: