Although I do think the spam issue is managable. Askmet (which really is a vital part of the WordPress ecosystem) works well enough to keep a lid on spam as far as this blog is concerned (it was a real pain back in the days when I still used Moveable Type). And this blog has been around more than a decade, and has thousands of posts.

I’ve often wondered if a Twitter-like service could run on a network of independently-run servers. Something like email or NNTP. But spam has made it difficult to trust… how do you protect the network of trusted servers without making it very hard to get a new server in? This is exactly the problem with mail… there is no trust mechanism and anyone can set up a server and start sending mail, add it had to be received by the rest of the network. But as a mail server operator. I’d hate to pay an expensive license or jump through onerous hoops to get accepted into the network.

When you post something online, you think more of “Which groups of people do you want to see (or not see) this” rather than “Which networks shall I post this on”. Similarly when reading posts, you sort and filter based on who it’s from, and what it’s about rather than where it’s posted.

That might improve the signal-to-noise ratio if it means we stop seeing the same updates cross-posted to multiple networks, as happens a lot at the moment.