Some thoughts —

The original "Eternal September" (on Usenet) wasn't an influx of abusers. It was an influx of new users who didn't know how to do things properly yet.

Most of the new users were from the America Online (AOL) private service, and known as "AOLers". (As it happens, I joined Usenet around the same time, but from a local dial-up Unix BBS in the Washington DC area.)

The AOLers didn't know which aspects of the service as they saw it were due to the AOL custom client software, which were due to the AOL local server, which were due to the newsgroup (forum) they were looking at, and which were due to the global Usenet consensus. So when they had a problem, they didn't know where to address that problem. They complained on public newsgroups about UI issues with their local client, because they didn't know what was what.

And the existing users didn't have the time or capacity to help them. The AOLers were added to Usenet en-masse without preparation. Nobody had signed up to help them. The AOLers were accustomed to AOL chat rooms that had staff helpers and moderators; most of Usenet did not have any — just regularly-posted FAQ documents, which the AOLers did not know to look for, and grouchy users who angrily told them to read the goddamn FAQ before posting.

Another consequence of the influx of new folks was that Usenet suddenly just had a lot more people. This made it a tasty target for commercial spammers and other abusers; which led to the eventual spampocalypse and a lot of people abandoning Usenet for web forums or other services.

It wasn't long into Eternal September that the hardcore abusers showed up, though. That, I think, is the harder problem to deal with.

"Good" Usenet servers did not reliably disconnect themselves from the servers that were accepting and forwarding spam. It was not generally acknowledged that a good server needs to block bad servers: the free-speech ideal was assumed to mean "accept anything from anyone; let the client decide what to filter out" — which meant that new users who had not written any filters necessarily saw all the spam.

And because nothing was secured by strong encryption, forgery was rampant; with a little cleverness, anyone could pretend to be anyone from any server.

There were many, many efforts to fix the spam problem. Unfortunately, as things turned out, it wasn't enough. Eventually folks noticed that the NNTP facility offered by their ISPs was a great means for sharing pirated porn ....

I'm wondering the same, I would guess grey listing and shadow banning to be the most effective.

How long until we start seeing tiktok/instagram/facebook/reddit reposts.

I think it's important to enable account portability across instances, like what Mastodon has. It should be easy for people to move to a different community, back up their data so they can re-substantiate their known persona if their instance goes poof, etc.

Individual instances will have to moderate themselves. If they become chaotic, other instances should unfederate them. But as users, you should also subscribe to communities you think are behaving well and block users/communities that are not.

Also, I have seen some users who are "grabbing" as many communities as possible, namely @Hurts@lemmy.world. Dude is moderating 60 communities, in an instance that started a few days ago.. He is not building the communities, he is just power tripping it seems. @ruud@ruud@lemmy.world, something might have to be done about that in the future. I suggest some sort of "requestcommunity", in which you can apply to become the mod of said community, if community is being badly run (or not run at all).

We'll live, we'll see. Meta is showing its interest in mastodon, so we have a reason to worry. But I think, lemmy will change according to the situation, when situation will be present, not before it.

Lol at creating a new open source platform with free speech and immediately asking how to eliminate it.

In the older, better days of the internet, "assholes" were just a part of it.

Learn to deal

there are multiple ways evil can behave on lemmy:

trolling

• trolling, it is annoying, if 25% of all posts are troll posts, the site can be annoying to use.
  • content voting systems can mitigate this tho, but bots will eventually find a way to game this?
• the difference between trolling and spamming (imo): trolls type in their message with a physical keyboard. Spammers use bots to automate trolling

(Bot) Spamming / automated troll farms

• spamming, creates huge load on storage capacity of the server owner, not good if you host for ~~free~~
  • spam can be hard to detect in the age of chatgpt LLMs in general, because normal spam would be detected by how random it is. for example

adfjakjdfkl would be easily detected as spam

• spamming huge amounts of text is still better than spammers creating huge amounts of video and photographs
• proof of work algorithms can mitigate this issue somewhat, tho this also makes performance worse for everyone

any other thoughts on proof of work, or how evil doers can behave on social media sides?

If a server admin turns out to be a giant asshole (present company excepted, of course), is there a way to migrate your identity to another instance?

If a server admin gets hit by a bus and their instance goes away, do all the users just cease to exist?