Thanks for the response! Yeah it is a really nice convenience.

My point is couldn’t someone exploit that with a website that has a url matching a common grammatical error of this type?

You could put the chicken before the egg too by making a bunch of bot comments hat appear plausible except for errors like that and then actually launch the website right?

If I “accidentally” link to that hostile website by making a totally normal “grammatical error” how do you establish intent?

From a zoomed out database/admin level how do you quickly tell the difference between the two in bulk amounts of posts/comments you can’t possibly search all the way through by hand…?

Note here, in order for instances to properly federate in some sense copies of posts and interactions have to be made across multiple servers, this is one of the basic security/data control tradeoffs of the fediverse but the positive is that it naturally sets up the possibility (if that is what people want) for data to be “backed up” in multiple places making truly dead links a less likely outcome. A database engineer might look at the fediverse and scream about duplication of data all over the place but that is only one perspective to take on design, resiliency and redundancy have values we can easily invisibilize when we start quantifying everything.

The most important thing for making a fediverse that helps preserve human interactions I think is getting people excited about the generative capacity of sharing and duplication rather than just seeing these as a peculiarity of federation on ActivityPub and an inherent weakness/messiness to it.