Implement generalized scalable protection against disruptive behavior in content discovery
Spam and intentional disruption are a major problem in the clearnet. They make it infeasible to have comments on websites without moderation teams, privacy invading humanity checking, and access-restrictions, and they force social networks to decide between invasive censorship and exposing their community to abuse, propaganda and targeted harassment. The core of the problem is that spam scales better than spam-blocking.
This project brings the spam-defense from the Hyphanet Project to the fediverse. It replaces instant global visibility with incremental local visibility, fueled by positive social interaction and transitive blocking, so spammers quickly become invisible to most. To scale for groups of arbitrary size, it extends the system from Hyphanet by adding pruning of inactive accounts and efficient rediscovery. With this project, spam-protection scales better than spamming, reducing the work needed to cope with hostile communication, so group-communication won’t require the outsourced, underpaid moderation teams that are prevalent in most centralized social networks.
This project was funded through theNGI Assure Fund, a fund established byNLnet with financial support from the European Commission'sNext Generation Internet programme, under the aegis ofDG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No957073.