(PLEASE READ) Rant about "why is nobody doing anything about Matrix moderation", profane, more of a plea than anything
I've seen a lot of people complaining about recent Matrix spam waves (as is understandable, it really is absolutely revolting), but then proceeding to blame it on the developer community for not dealing with it.
I'm sorry, but I can't hold my tongue on this any longer.
There ARE things happening. Moderation tooling is being spearheaded finally, but obviously this shit takes time to be developed, and unfortunately a lot of the immediate stuff is being made by smaller players like myself.
First off, please keep in mind that Synapse and Element are not the only components in the Matrix ecosystem. There are other server implementations, and other clients, and other organizations other than New Vector Ltd and matrix.org.
Here's a summary of the things I have PERSONALLY done over the past few months:
1. I have implemented the new Policy Servers MSC into Meowlnir (a from-scratch moderation tool), as Element's is still closed-source and request-to-use. I created this with very lacking specification docs, and had to reverse engineer some of it to make the policy server functional.
2. I created matrix-invite-logger to allow people to automatically log and also block incoming invites for accounts they have on servers they do not run, or when their server does not support synapse-anti-spam
3. I have added powerful moderation tooling to clients like Gomuks, and spend time trying to urge other client developers to implement support for additional moderation tooling in their clients when I haven't had the time to open PRs myself.
4. I have integrated registration checking into my bot's server info command so that I can see at a glance if a server is vulnerable to registration spam. I have used this to make contact with over a hundred server administrators already.
5. I have gone out of my way to engineer a server scraper that will (when it's finished) automatically scrape Matrix to find vulnerable servers, add them to a policy list to temporarily protect rooms from them, and will either automatically contact server admins or get me to do it, to tell them that they are vulnerable.
6. I have spent time contributing bug fixes to the most popular moderation bot on Matrix, Draupnir, used by communities like Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE
7. With the abrupt archival of conduwuit, I have (together with a small team) forked it into continuwuity, where we are aiming to focus on trust & safety tooling, including my experimental and trailblazing appservice callbacks to allow regular appservices to filter spam
8. I have been pushing for room takedowns in the community moderation effort crowdsourced policy list, in order to get rid of these horrific rooms as soon as they crop up
9. I have been making extensive contact with the Matrix Foundation to see what's going on on matrix.org, and offer advice and give feedback on their moderation
10. I have developed a multi-account monitoring tool that currently watches a lot of public rooms for spam waves and automatically bans them before they propagate to other communities. I'm slowly getting other communities on board with this, and already have the support of several large FOSS projects
11. I have engaged in lengthy talks with ecosystem developers to ensure that moderation tooling is getting caught up to par.
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#matrix
nexy <3
