Discurage spamming PeerTube

PeerTube has a feature called recent added videos, i.e. the user can see what videos were added recently. This page also is loaded as a home page. The reason I believe this feature should not exist are the following:

  • Is a target for spammers. Recently I have seen this already on PeerTube. The spammer can upload the same short (several KB) advertising video every minute or even every several seconds. The result is the recent videos page is spammed.

  • I don’t think is is useful to someone to look into the federated page where millions of people are supposed to post.

There is also “popular videos”, but this is harder to exploit by spammers. This feature is ok.

I think it’s as exploitable as the chronological timeline on Mastodon. And like with Mastodon, it is a moderation problem, not a problem introduced by chronological display of videos. If the spammer is identified, it should be suspended.

If the user owns the instance?.. In this case it meas that every node admin in the network should ban it?..

I’m afraid that’s how reporting content works. On any platform. As a user, when you see infringing content, you report it and your admin takes action.

On PeerTube every other instance in the network should also take action on their own (because they are independent). Now, you can see that as very inefficient, and one can certainly try to build federated moderation lists. We’re just not there yet and haven’t thought it through.

In the meantime, the best option is to directly contact the instance administrator where the spam originates from and tell them to enforce some moderation unless they want to be banned.

There is also “popular videos”, but this is harder to exploit by spammers. This feature is ok.

In fact there is no security in this page, (instances are thrustfull to other instances).
You can simply create your own instance and edit the video count in the db with pgadmin, (normaly other instances will stop following you but that require an human intervention).
You can also spam the views endpoint to do the same but on an other instance.