As the Federation grows, as new members and more content becomes available, the value to others with commercial, or simple ill-intention becomes greater.
As we add increasingly sophisticated tools (such as Search Engines, or forms of notification we must always be vigilant against such attacks that will rapidly degrade the unique quality of the Federations User Experience. In this battle we can and should rely on the social architecture of small farms of dedicated users.
# Search and Scraping
Our scraping experience suggests we should distribute the function across all servers and move slowly enough that site owners can direct the spider's progress.
Should we make farm servers responsible for exploring the server-visible neighborhoods described here then we will find that we have placed additional trust on those writing within the farm. Farms then must protect themselves against the bad actor who would trick the server's search to extend into undesirable neighborhoods.
A site operator will need the ability to expel any site that fails to operate within the best interests of the others and to thereby expunge bad neighbors from its search. Site operators will then become the judges who in their small realm must distinguish the progressive from the subversive, the griefers from the good.
The intellectual health of the federation and the culture it supports then depends on careful admission of new authors into farms hosted and paid for with a purpose. Should these become a network of ingroups then we will face an arms race between progressives and griefers which I expect the progressives will win.
# Identity and Reputation
In the evolution of this struggle, the Federation has some unique properties that we should leverage and amplify in our defence. Each site is owned by an author. It is their turf. It is curated and cared for as a Semi-private Space. We don't want trespassers, and we will defend our neighbours from those that trespass against us.
Reputation is a strange beast. Crass technical solutions are suggested. We have had simplified experiments in ratings and badges. But we are at the beginning of the first wave of Reputation Based Infrastructure for the Web. We have hard cryptographic tools, and a new range of decentralised metrics.
But real reputation is a subtle thing. It is far better captured through Writing With Strangers than it is by simple points and scores. It is a realtionship, and the Federation is a place to explore such relationships.
We need both. We need to Immunise the Federation.
We need to trust our plugins. Search is one such example, whether is be baked into a server farm, or made available through a plugin.
# See also