Comment on flohmarkt a federated alternative to ebay and facebook marketplace
skisnow@lemmy.ca 3 weeks agoHow does location specificity limit spam? Surely the nature of spam is it costs nothing to produce and is done en masse.
And I mean any kind of bad actor really. Spammer, scammer, or even just a griefer deciding the gum up the system for lulz.
To be clear these are genuine questions, I’m not here to shit on the project or anything. I’d love more than anything for there to be good answers to them.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Spam is about reach, as 99.9% of the recipients will not buy anything from a spammer. Obviously the location specificity of Flohmarkt doesn’t prevent other forms of abuse, but it makes Flohmarkt instances very unattractive for commercial spammers as you can’t reach a sufficiently broad user-base with your relatively generic ads.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Either I’ve not understood your point, or you’re suggesting that spammers would limit themselves to one instance?
Spam is about volume, and a 0.1% takeup rate would be a dream for a spammer.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
I actually typed 99.999% first, but then decided some stickler would for sure question that number then 🤦
The point is that operating on hundreds of different pages that each have limited reach and interact only in a limited fashion in a way that isn’t a problem for legitimate users but severely limits the volume spammers can reach is a lot of work. Spam only makes sense when it is cheap and high volume.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Sorry, I’m still stuck on what the limiting aspect of it is. “Operating on hundreds of pages that each have limited reach” costs next to nothing if it’s all automated with bots.