Microblogging with ActivityPub [LWN.net]

Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Nov 30, 2022 9:17 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: Microblogging with ActivityPub by tau
Parent article: Microblogging with ActivityPub

> it will need to come up with a solution to the problems that plague "federation[s] somewhat like email".

The problem of email spam-filtering is pretty much a solved problem by now. My personal email account has been using SpamAssassin for a long time, and while not perfect, it seems to be "good enough" at least. (And one good thing about it is that whenever a false-positive occurs, the end user can still see the email message that was flagged as spam, as long as they've configured their MUA's filtering rules to direct spam into a "spam folder" and then read that folder occasionally.)

So it seems like a similar appoach (using Bayesian filtering) could eventually be used for ActivityPub as well. Furthermore, (same as with email) it might also be possible for ActivityPub spam-filtering to be done on the client-side, for end users who don't want their server operators to be in full control of the spam-filtering.

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Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Nov 30, 2022 9:43 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

The problem with that approach is that - because spam filtering is so good - users don't check their spam filters.

The combination of Thunderbird filters and server-side spam marking works so well for me that when stuff does get misclassified, it can VERY easily get mass-deleted by mistake ... usually stuff I actively want :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Nov 30, 2022 11:08 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

The problem with that approach is that - because spam filtering is so good - users don't check their spam filters.

Having to check a spam filter defies the purpose of using one in the first place. The whole point of having a spam filter is not having to look at the spam.

I don't have a spam folder. I'm running a pre-queue spam checker and stuff that looks like spam is refused by my server while it is still in the process of being submitted, with an SMTP error code. If a legitimate message is misidentified as spam, then at least the sender can potentially do something about it, rather than believing that the message went through while in reality it is sitting in some spam folder that I look at once a month or not at all.

Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Nov 30, 2022 12:21 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (2 responses)

> Having to check a spam filter defies the purpose of using one in the first place.

I disagree with that; I consider the user-experience of having a spam folder that you check occasionally — but less frequently than your main inbox — to be better than that of having no spam filter at all, and also better than that of blindly trusting the filtering software (or whatever kind of filtering-system that the server operator uses… especially the comment-filtering systems in non-email, publically-visible discussion systems run by huge for-profit companies such as Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc., i.e. the kind "that employ a large body of low-wage overseas labor" to manually or semi-manually filter stuff that tau mentioned above) to not produce any false-positives.

(Revisiting what I said earlier about client-side email filtering: if you run SpamAssassin on the client-side, you can take any false-positive messages that end up in your spam folder and pass them to the sa-learn utility as "ham" messages, and also take any false-negative messages that end up in your main inbox and pass them to the sa-learn utility as "spam" messages, in order to train its filtering model to produce fewer incorrect results in the future.)

Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Nov 30, 2022 12:39 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (1 responses)

(Addendum: that kind of abillity for an end-user to train their own personalized spam-filtering model is a feature that I'd like to see implemented by ActivityPub/Mastodon clients in the future.)

Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Nov 30, 2022 14:16 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Something I'd also like to see is Thunderbird rules to allow filtering on the BODY of the message. Dunno what's happened, but somehow my email has got associated with someone called "David", so every now and then I get a splurge of spam starting "Dear David". Anything addressed to David can go *straight* in the bin, but I can't configure TB to search on that !!!

Cheers,
Wol

Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 1, 2022 16:20 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The difference here is that, unlike email, there's no cultural pressure to pretend to accept everything from strangers in the first place, and the protocol isn't a substrate for important transactions. ActivityPub filtering can afford to be much more aggressive.

Microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 1, 2022 12:55 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

If Email spam filtering was a solved problem we wouldn't see so much snake-oil like IP reputation services and grey listing in that area.