Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?

It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon.

There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce.

Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues.

It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.

And we all know Reddit is free from spam and bots.

Mastodon is a federated system like StatusNet/GNU Social.

So, in your opinion, Mastodon nodes - by virtue of being federated - would be better equipped to handle the spam and harassment volume that Twitter is subject to?

I find that hard to believe.

ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).

Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.

You mean like how we defederate email servers that have lots of spammers but also lots of legitimate users.

Oh wait no we don't.

I have no opinion on its ability to replace Twitter, but the federated nature of Mastodon means that an instance can disconnect from the instances that are hosting spam accounts, much the same as many instances have disconnected from servers that host racist and alt-right communities and accounts.

Why do we need to identify and ban those in the first place?. When I used Twitter I never thought "oh man, these spam bots are ruining my twitter experience". It was more like "Oh, another bot is following me". Didn't waste more than 2 seconds of my day.

The bots are manipulating the trending topics which means they're driving the kinds of conversations happening on twitter.

Regardless of the technical measures, I think we can all agree something called 'Mastodon' will be safe from spam bots in perpetuity simply by virtue of not having any non-geek users.

"Hey Melissa, here's my Mastodon handle, hit me up."

"Your... what?"

"My Mastodon, it's a federated social network free from any corporate overlord!"

"Whatever, freak..."

As opposed to the service that litterally has "twit" in the name? Or the nonsense that has been search engine naming conventions (Google, yahoo, bing, etc)? I think you overestimate the ability for society to accept a name.

OP was talking about the nerdness (think "PGP keys") rather than the name itself.

BTW Mastadon sounds like it's related to BDSM or ED meds IMHO.

"Sweetcheeks, have you heard of Mastadon?"

"I'm not into that dear!"

or

"When the moment is right... Ask your doctor about... Mastadon"

A real activist would pull out in the forest and start their own society. :)

Sometimes we need to fix the things that are broken instead of leaving.

Would Twitter be allowed to federate if it implement the Mastodon protocol.

Think carefully.

Yes, of course. However, if I'm not mistaken, each Mastodon server instance creates their own policies regarding what other servers can tweet to their users. So it would be trivial for any Mastodon server to "ban" Twitter users from posting in their instance.

Maybe even use your hacker powers to spin up a Mastodon instance of your own so your friends have somewhere to go where they know the person running it.

How is that anything but abandonment?

You say that like Twitter declaring bankruptcy would be a bad thing