Making Social Media Social

As some of you might know, the author is part of a team moderating a Mastodon server. Mastodon is open-source software that can be used to connect to the Fediverse, a federated social network. Many people don't know how to run a server or don't have the resources to do so, so public servers offer accounts to people. However, spammers have found this loophole to create accounts and send scam links.

The author's server, tldr.nettime.org, disabled automated account creation to combat this issue. While this made the process harder, it also led to more human connections and interactions. The author found that people were sending emails with information about their friends and work related to the community. This manual process was more enjoyable for the author and made signing up feel like a welcome to a party, rather than fighting spam.

The author wonders if the success of this approach in smaller, connected groups could indicate that massive servers might not be ideal.