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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive
(signal.org)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The article says it's to limit spam. I don't feel platforms like Lemmy (or the other platform) are particularly spammy though. On the other hand I get a lot more spam on Whatsapp, even though it's phone number bound.
Signal is pretty good in terms of limited spam, but I'm curious about the impact if they A/B test the removal and see how much spam would arise. Obviously that could only be implemented after they remove the need to add contact via phone number.
If more people joined Lemmy you’d see the amount of spam this place would get. Now it’s only a bunch of nerds who will quickly report any spammy activity. It’s a small “friendly” community for now.
Niche communities don't deal with spam.
But the moment it's big enough Lemmy will be rife with spammers and you'll need full time moderation tools.
If you go to Reddit which is more popular for bots certain subs are completely filled with spam and votebots. r/worldnews is like a giant circle of pro IDF bots jerking eachother off. LSF became a shitshow too.
And that's with a fairly active mod team too. Imagine the spam if there were no controls.
To be fair, the mods are complicit
plenty of instances have email verification and or captcha, and those that don't get defederated (sometimes) (this already happened)