But wouldn't clients have to decide which federated servers it wanted to participate in? E.g., if I join #python on Freenode...
- Do I necessarily want my chat to be intermingled with #python on EFNnet, OFTC, etc.?
- How would you prevent new users from auto-subscribing to a spam server? Do you just ban the spammy server? Would every server operator need to manage such a ban individually?
Bridged rooms are namespaced by whoever runs the bridge - e.g. #freenode_#python:matrix.org is the alias for the bridge to #python on Freenode that's run by matrix.org. Similarly #efnet_#python:matrix.org would be the alias for the EFnet room, if we ran an #efnet bridge. It's possible for a malicious user to try to bridge unrelated rooms together, but this is an abuse problem no different to someone floodjoining or otherwise trying to harm a room.
Handling spam and abuse in general is a huge issue for Matrix which we're putting massive focus on at the moment (in fact, it's why we're in SF at the Decentralized Web Summit currently). The whole decentralized web movement has a crisis on the horizon if there isn't a decentralized identity/reputation/abuse system of some kind to track miscreants and help admins and users mitigate spam.
Edit: in other words, right now a server admin would have to manually blacklist bad servers. In future there'd be a decentralised data structure of some kind (stellar ledger, blockchain, matrix DAG, IPFS DAG or whatever) tracking the greylist of servers/users/gateways to help decide who you want to talk to.
- Do I necessarily want my chat to be intermingled with #python on EFNnet, OFTC, etc.?
- How would you prevent new users from auto-subscribing to a spam server? Do you just ban the spammy server? Would every server operator need to manage such a ban individually?