I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.
- Bots can disrupt smaller instances:
What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What’s stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It’s safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.
- Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:
Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all instances to flood major them with ads. With generative content, it is so much easier to make a seemingly casual post about a product and mask it as an advertisement.
I’ve seen previous posts about people wanting to come because of their opinion about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.
What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI?
Nothing. And they already have.
What’s stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities?
Moderation.
When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there.
Why would they do that when every instance has the same content?
Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads
I mean they can but no one would subscribe to them or share them, so no one would see them, so why would they bother making them?
about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.
Sometimes the two are actually one in the same.
Too many small instances that will block and/or break away. People will then leave the corporate ones and join the smaller ones who will have joined up with each other.
Big Business is what has killed and is killing places like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and others. Big Business FAILS to interact with people in conversations outside what effected them. They keep saying that they have a place on these sites and that we should follow them, but the odds of them following back is not that great, and the odds of them having a conversation about other things is even slimmer.
Big Business pretends to be apart of the “in crowd”, but fails on how to really be apart of it. On the dead bird, I followed very few businesses, celebrities and influencers, as I noticed most were just about them, and not conversing with those with few followers. I also find that with them, they want to be able to boost about the number of followers and collect checks from big business, the platform and others. Ever watch an IRL streamer on Twitch, Kick or some other platform? For me, I find most of them to be boring and it appears that they are way to lazy to get a job, as they simply want to get people to give them money for them doing nothing.
What I have found interesting is how many people and businesses have gone running back to the dead bird after seeing how few followers they have gotten on decentralized platforms. I think that they find it hard to believe that they are not as important as they think that they are.
I think that businesses learned when watching other businesses drop out of having their own server when they set up instances with Mastodon and very few came. They also saw that they couldn’t “ad” us to death like they could on Twitter. They have made a few small inroads onto other centralized platforms, as the owners are using that money to keep going, but the Fediverse as a whole is to complicated to try and hijack.
This in my opinion shouldnt be viewed as a bad thing. If they do then they are joining the fediverse and bringing all their walled garden content over to an open protocol. If this happens we still have the power to choose a server that does not federate with them while their users also have the choice to move to a server that better aligns with their values.
If a big tech company hosted a server and participated like a good citizen then it should be welcomed but if they federate ads then everyone would criticize them and defederate.
Yeah personally I like being able to follow Threads users without needing a Threads account or exposing my information to Meta and I honestly don’t understand the vocal opposition to that.
Everything posted on the public web is potential AI training data, federation is completely irrelevant to that.
The rest of your questions has the simple answer that a priori there is nothing “stopping” any of that. You should choose an instance whose admins are looking out for things like that and keeping your experience enjoyable, banning spambots or defederating from spambot farms when they are discovered.
Thankfully, there aren’t any ads here. Just the thought of it stresses me out, and when I get stressed out, I reach for a Morley cigarette to keep my cool. The toasted tobacco and asbestos filter make for a smoother smoke, which soothes the throat. 9 out of 10 anti-ad, Fediverse, activists choose Morleys to keep up their pep and vigor in the fight against advertisement.
Fuck now I want a smoke!
When you’re done, look inside for coupons for other quality products from Croft Foods and Jenny-Ralph Mills among others. You could be enjoying the satisfying crunch of Let’s potato chips and washing it down with a nice, refreshing can of Cuke, all while impressing your significant other by being such a smart shopper and protecting the family budget.
Who are you going to listen to? This guy?
Or Fred Flintstone?
Winstons?! That’s a baby’s cigarette! And I should know because
ourthe parent company of Morleys, Philly Mortis, used to own the Croft Food company, which has a line of baby foods. Also most pediatricians prefer Morley Juniors for the little ones anyway.On a side note, I’ve got to appreciate the level of detail in that ad. His lighter works by rubbing two sticks together. I will never not be delighted by the Flintstones’ anachronisms.
It’s a really catchy commercial, too. “Winston tastes good like a…cigarette should.”
It really is. I guess the silver lining is that hundreds of years of smoking might at least influence our natural selection such that the average person is slightly more resistant to wildfire smoke and acetylcholine agonists/ acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. Perhaps we’ve been training for the environmental disasters and chemical warfare that climate change may bring.
Smoking at recess helped me pass my math exams! 5×5 is 20 just like the number cigarettes in a pack of Morleys. And the number years subtracted from my life expectancy! Thanks Morley! For the maths.
Morley and you! The smarter combination.
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Morley Turkish Golds!
more like comedy silver, amirite?
Silver screen?
Aye
Noice
Legendary comment, take your internet points
thats another thing. no internet points, so no bots to farm them. upvotes really only indicate the quality of the post or comment that receives the upvotes. no way to use the total number of points to claim validity of your posts or to brag with them.
that being said, at one point we will need to figure out a way to identify and prevent bots that just post propaganda. while we wont have the problem of karmawhoring bots, they dont have the need to karmawhore and can try to spread their propaganda immediately.
Upvotes on a comment are still internet points :p also this comment was just made as lighthearted fun not as something serious
ok sorry :(
i am just worried that the idea of karma on lemmy starts to gain traction :D
I never got why it was important to have “karma” tbh. Just encourages you to only post funny stuff or something the group in x community agrees with otherwise oh no you lose internet points 🫠
back when reddit was not just a meme shithole, karma was used to motivate people to post quality content. 90% of the stuff posted on reddit nowadays would get downvoted into oblivion back then. typo in the title or image caption? downvoted. repost? downvoted. low effort? downvoted.
but with growing popularity the flat number of (usually young) users grew that hat other quality standards grew and these kind of faults were ignored. meme became bigger, and there was a general shift in reddits userbase. they changed the algorith to calculate your score and suddenly you could get just so.much.karma from cheap posts.
some communities became very strict in their content to avoid shitposts. some used karma to prevent trolls participating in their subs. nowadays high karma accounts are being sold as they can be used to participate in subreddits with a high reputation (due to participation limitations) and upvoting/downvoting and commenting on certain post can very heavily skew its visibility and impression of the discussed topic on “neutral” users.
so yea, karma used to be a good thing (good content motivation), became a bad thing (karmawhoring), which was still utilized for good things (participation limitation), which led to even worse things (karmafarming bots).
lemmy will have to deal with this sooner or later. there will be bots brigading communities on certain topics and there need to be some kind of indicators to distinguish honest users and trolls.
Karma can be a useful trust signal, until it’s accused of course and gamified.
I think a lot of negative karma in a month leading to red names or something with it resetting every month would be fine, I just dont like the idea of one bad take silencing someone, or one meme elevating someone
Instead of tracking overall points track streaks, if they get a lot of unique downvotes often flag them.
I got you an AI-generated karma bot propaganda poster. No need to thank me.
Thank you. I’ll see myself out.
Not much to do against scraping. On a small (but actively moderated) instance, a spamming bot will easily be detected and hopefully suspended. Generally, moderation is often better on smaller instances, so I’m not too worried about people migrating towards bigger instances - usually it’s the other way round.
For 2. - dedicated corp instances will be defederated from many instances quickly. Bridge accounts on other instances need to be dealt with by the mods.
Yes, of course this can increase moderation effort. But spam accounts are way more easy to deal with from a moderation perspective than issues between real human users which usually takes wayyy more effort to deal with.
What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What’s stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities
Nothing stops them right now. Currently they’re causing effective DDOS by scraping manually and there’s no good way to block them except by going to extremes.
In fact, I would prefer if they just used their own instance to scrape content instead of causing downtimes like they do now.
Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:
For that, the solution is simple, we can defederate.
I’m new and still trying to learn. What would defederating imply? An instance being blocked by all other instances?
Federation is where one instance “talks” to another and exchanges content. If your instance isn’t federated then you’d just be stuck with your own content and members with no outside interaction.
Exactly. See also Gab and Truth Social.
Am I reading this right? Meta tried to be compatible with Lemmy and every server owned agreed to mass block them and leave them out?
Threads is twitter style (like Mastodon) so it’s not going to have much to do with Lemmy. Threads allows users to opt-into a sort of half-Federation where Mastodon users can follow their content. It’s a unique case and not how Federation normally works.
With Mastodon, content from users on other instances is not “downloaded” unless someone on that instance specifically chooses to follow it. So it’s not like every small Mastodon instance that federates with threads is going to be overwhelmed by all the millions of user feeds on Threads.
Tbh there is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding Threads federation, but in short- there is no technical way for them to “extinguish the fediverse” even if they really, really, wanted to.
Not every instance blocked them, but many did.
The fear of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish got a hold of the fediverse when Threads was originally announced.
Not Lemmy specifically, but the broader fediverse (and probably mostly the microblog part dominated by Mastodon and its forks)
Most of the core mastodon servers haven’t blocked threads…
You can block Threads yourself even if your instance doesn’t
I don’t know how you define “most” or “core” here, but it’s certainly true that mastodon.social and its ~400K users remain federated with Threads.
A lot of instances did block or limit them though, and I’m not going to sit down and calculate which side is in majority 🤷
Most by number of users, I’d guess.
I’m on mastodon.social, and basically never see threads posts.
“Defederating” just means two instances won’t talk anymore. For example, your instance (lemm.ee) is currently defederated from three others (You can see here). It means you won’t see any posts/comments from users on those instances.
No, defederation just means 1 instance chooses to stop communicating with another instance.
An instance being blocked by all other instances?
No, defederating is just a single instance blocking another instance, not the entire fediverse doing so.
You can defederate from the corporate servers.
They already tried it. It’s called Threads. It exists. People use it. And other instances have the choice to simply not federate with them.
To me (as unpopular as this sounds) that’s the beautiful thing about FOSS and about Federation in particular. No one is stopping anyone from creating their own instance. Even Corporations.
It’s the ultimate expression of “Anyone can do what they want, say what they want, believe what they want…but no one else is in any way obligated to listen to them/federate with them”
I know of companies that host small mastodon instances for their staff to communicate back and forth. I know of similar setups with lemmy instances. Anyone can use the technology for anything they wish to.
but with threads users have to opt into federation, and… no one does. almost every profile I check keeps it disabled. it even gives them a notice after a while like “hey, you’re sharing with the fediverse, you sure you want to keep this on?”
Well said. I personally don’t get the opposition to Threads using ActivityPub. I like being able to follow Threads profiles without exposing myself to Meta.
Well for the me reason there aren’t as many troll farms operating here in comparison to reddit. There are just not enough users here yet.
Like others pointed out defederation, but to add the important bit for normies (don’t mean derogatory at all) is that it is not meant to be a less complicated or more efficient experience, it is meant to have more (or actual) freedom and democracy.
Much like with gov politics, you have to be active to some degree or a few people can control everything.
So yes, when defederation needs to happen or communities moved (for much of that additional tools will streamline the processes in the future I’m sure), it’s a bit messy, but it doesn’t rob you or feed the megacorps pushing the society into more inequality.
1 - You can block/ignore entire instances. (spamming ones)
2 - If it gets big enough, you’ll see legit instances band together and federate only among themselves (white-list, invite only to allow federation)
people will gravitate to these groups of instances if they are well moderated and keep that crap out.
Smaller instances, being smaller are actually easier to moderate and have and easier time detecting those things than then bigger ones. Small instance many times are small, not because they’re new but because they heavily moderate who can belong to their server and federate with their content.
It’s the biggest instance that tend to have worst quality of moderation, thus being more at risk of things like AI scraping or bots.
There’s a reason people who practically have been on the fediverse from the very beginning tend to tell you to avoid flagship and massive instances; those are a moderation nightmare, both to their own admins and to other intances’ admins.
2- Most fediverse software have tool to block AI, bots and ads.
On what’s stopping corporations from taking over the Fediverse…We are. Our ability to decide whom we federate with is stopping corporations from taking over.
Nothing. Except that they don’t give a shit. Fedi population is tiny and irrelevant.
Let me put it into perspective. Currently Fediverse as a whole has around 50k daily active users and 1.3m monthly active users split between multiple services with Mastodon being the most active. These are the stats for something that exists for over a decade.
I used to work in a company making some social media products. When we launched our main product we had 1m daily active users within a month and I don’t remember how many monthly users (that was over 10 years ago). And it just grew from there.
Facebook Threads has 100m daily active users now. The whole Fediverse is a tiny echo chamber and no one cares or knows about its existence.
Its sad that we are so tiny but its also a blessing that we have this corner of the internet to ourselves
Well, nothing is sad on its own, it all depends on the priorities of people behind. If the priority is to keep Fediverse small and under the radar, then everything is going great.
You’re right. I was feeling sad because I was hoping more people would share the values that would lead them to pick a place like this over facebook. I know this place will win in the end I just fear the damage that will be done before global communication is freed from the grips of companies.
Well, you can’t do anything meaningful at large scale without a company. Every large and popular open source project has a company behind and there are legal reasons behind it. If the Fediverse becomes big enough, there will be a point when a company will be required for it to function.
I disagree. You don’t need a company but do do need a form of governance behind a la4ge project. There are plenty of Foss projects that grew large and became a core block of a wide ecosystem without having a company be the sole backer. Off the top of my head http and oauth
You’re potentially right, which is why for my own account I host my own instance. Which I truly understand is not for everyone.
When it comes to communities themselves, that’s a bit more difficult but I am hoping that we (the ‘inhabitants’ of the Fediverse) will ignore those attempt and actively block their instances if it does become a “threat”.
For scraping, I made this point before in a different post, but: the internets public, if we do not want to get scraped, stay in private local communities. The public nature of most communities means you’re out of luck trying to block scraping altogether.
