On mastodon, I’m starting to be followed by accounts I have no relationship with at all (a famous guy I doubt would ever follow me, a supposed magazine about a subject I never talked about and with a name not really related to the subject of their posts…).

Is this a trend? Is it a strategy to get people to follow them back so they have more followers? Is this the fediverse version of spam?

    • Ninguém@lemmy.ptOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      I’m afraid you might be right!

      What’s your theory?

      My nightmare goes like this:

      • Some form of spam and plain wrongdoing will emerge with the rise of awareness about this fediverse thing.
      • To cut a long story short: then some form of control will have to be put in place - like spam filters, blacklists, server whitelists and the like - and the hole thing goes the way of the email and the usenet, making it almost impossible to keep a server as an independent hobbyist.
      • Some cleaver provider will offer a free $ervice and enforces the control techniques mentioned above reinforcing its use and closing the circle.

      My hope:

      • This thing will “never fly” and consequently only really committed and interesting people will linger. Great!
      • A second best hypothesis is becoming the second best forever - the best place to be, like linux.
      • The fediverse community gets really large and popular and has so many servers and services that it becomes impossible to capture by a single giant player.
      • People will “see it coming” and vote intelligently with their feet refusing the big players and choosing freedom instead. Hahahaha!..
      • Scott M. Stolz@loves.tech
        2·
        2 days ago

        It depends on how your platform handles unsolicited posts and whether it supports threads and the concept of conversation containers.

        For example, let’s compare Mastodon and Hubzilla.

        Mastodon does not notify you of replies to your posts, but does notify you if someone mentions you. It does not support threaded conversations, which means that anyone can comment on your post without your permission. You can block people, but that does not remove their posts or mentions.

        Hubzilla takes a different approach. Conversations are organized in threads, and the thread has a conversation owner. It is similar to how Facebook works in that regard. If you create a top level post on your own wall, you own that conversation. Similarly, if you post in a forum/group, the forum/group owns that conversation.

        As such, they can control who comments on it and even delete comments. You can even make private or group conversations that only certain people can participate in. Unsolicited comments are either discarded or accepted for moderation. They only appear if approved by the owner of the thread.

        And there are additional filtering and notification settings available.

        Because of this difference, undesired posts are more like to appear on Mastodon than on Hubzilla. And even if they do appear, they are easier to remove.

        The more tools you have to control notifications and what appears as replies to your posts, the better. But it also makes the system slightly more complicated. Think Facebook vs. Twitter. Both are social media, but how they handle things are very different.

        I am guessing that some platforms will fare better than others, and many platforms will have to adjust how they handle incoming posts as more people arrive in the fediverse.

        • Ninguém@lemmy.ptOP
          1·
          1 day ago

          Hum… good to know.

          I have no experience with hubzilla. Only mastodon and lemmy. And have no idea of how facebook or twitter work.

          Lets just hope the fediverse finds ways to deal with problems on the fly…