Nicole [LOCKED]

Yeah. IDK anything about the code behind lemmy but some kind of DM limiter or alert seems trivial.

Others have suggested that one should prevent images in messages altogether. Or at least if in the first message of an exchange. Or at least for new accounts or accounts without posts.

Coupling these ideas with federation, the following comes to mind:

1. Enable each instance to select from which other instances its users can receive messages with or without images.

2. Allow instance admins to set, individually for each instance they federate with, minimum requirements on accout age, number of posts, received upvotes etc., before (image) messages are accepted from an individual account. E.g. higher requirements if the account is on a poorly moderated instance. Or it has to have made at least one post or comment on the instance to whose user it wants to send a message.

In a different vein, which might be needed when Lemmy & other Fediverse services with private messages attract even more attention:

3. A federated 'spam alert system', as in: Instances can broadcast how much spam (and what kind, and how old the sending accouts were) they have most recently received from specified other instances. Now if an account on instance A sends a message to a user on instance B, instance B can combine the recent ratings from instances C, D, E, F about instance A, in order to decide whether to accept this message (or whether to delay it and delete it if the sender gets blocked on its home instance in the meantime, or only show it to users who have ticked a box). Of course, if the admins of B think that instance E regularly trash-talks other instances or instance A specifically, then they can automatically exclude the scores sent by E from entering into the decision. Taking things further, the best would probably be a highly modular approach, where only the spam alert broadcasts follow a common protocol, but the decision system can be different for each instance.

Most of these suggestions could probably work for upvotes/downvotes as well (only that it's more difficult to identify accounts that only manipulate votes and do nothing else – so an even fancier version of 3., perhaps even with broadcasting spam scores about individual accounts, could be needed).

There is definitely a place for DMs on this site and I’ve made use of them several times for various needs. However, there are huge fundamental weaknesses in its current setup.