| I'm sure that ads thing is something they put 99% of their resources on. They can easily augment their users' posts by randomly adding ads into them when relayed to ActivityPub. They can also comment on posts automatically or half-automatically from ads accounts. They can also post as their users. Like YouTube, when you look at a video, they put ad videos there in the start and in between, so they could do something like that by posting ads on influencer accounts. They can also reward the people themselves for posting ads. Anyhow, I already got one spam message on Mastodon from that browser-embedded instance, Vivaldi, because they didn't do a great job in vetting their users. I was already ready to block them if I receive another, but I never did. They will find a way to push garbage on ActivityPub I have no doubt. Regarding defederation, there are different levels. Typically you would silence the instance but allow people to follow single accounts from there. If it's more powerful to be fully open, then an email client without a spam filter would be superior to one with a spam filter. Twitter is moving towards closing up their network from users not signed in. EU is making it mandatory for social networks to be interoperable though, so that pulls to the other direction. In any case, it's not a great future for the big social network corporations because people can choose to have either what they offer or roughly the same without ads or tracking. |