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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

The weakness in AT seems to be the relay servers. Data/posts may be edited or deleted on a PDS, but once published what is the mechanism to alter or delete in clients/relays downstream?

Also what’s the mechanism to prevent AT from turning into a firehouse of usenet bot spam?

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What does that even mean? Relays not being able to arbitrarily edit posts is by design, and why PDS updates like posts are signed by their authors. That's a strength, not a weakness.

The mechanism for spam filtering is the same as any other network. You can drop posts from low-trust PDSes, or use Bluesky's existing labeling system to apply advisory "spam likely" labels to accounts or posts that some heuristic decides are spam. This can be done in a composable way with their algorithmic feed aggregator and labels.

> Allowing edits and arbitrary insertions also means you could easily pretend you posted something earlier than you did, or edit an earlier post to say something else [1]

[1] https://github.com/arcalinea/smor-serve

This is also a problem with ActivityPub. The 'delete' command is basically a suggestion.

I'm not sure I would describe that as a problem, just something people using federated networks should be aware of. It is inherent to any system that sends messages to a bunch of other peoples' computers unless it implements some sort of DRM, which is effectively incompatible with open source software.

> One person's bug is another person's feature

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