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.
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.
This is comedy gold
more like comedy silver, amirite?
Legendary comment, take your internet points
Thank you. I’ll see myself out.
We just defederate.
Facebook tried and we scoffed.
It’s called the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy of dealing with threats. Microsoft have been endorsing Linux recently for this reason.
Yes, except that you can’t really do that with open source things. If one instance/a particular piece of software gets compromised, you can always spawn a new one / fork a new project etc.
EEE was designed for open standards/projects.
For example, google talk originally used xmpp. They kept adding features that broke on the xmpp side of things, until people effectively used google talk. They then cut of xmpp, after successfully killing it.
That’s about the only thing they can do with open-source things.
They are already training on the fediverse. If something is on the public web, you can assume it’s in some training data somewhere
Wish there was a way to
easilypoison the inputBut sadly this’ll just be reality. The only thing we can do is either not use it or embrace it.
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.
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.
Threads is trying to become that. We have a list of instances blocking Threads here: https://fedipact.veganism.social/
Reminder that LW does not block Threads.net : https://lemmy.world/instances
Has anyone even seen Threads content anywhere? I’m not blocking Threads on my instance either. Neither am I blocking Nazi instances. Not because I endorse either of those things. Just because I have never even seen them. Easy enough to rectify if they ever pop up.
Given how many users threads claims, I suspect threads members must be de facto limited to threads communities. Even if they can, technically, subscribe to regular lemmy communities, how would they discover them? “320 million” threads users vs 65,000? 100,000? lemmy users? And community search is going to be flooded with options from the platform with 2000x more users.
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.
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.
As long as it’s online and public they can acces the info. But we have tools to fight back. Some instances are private unless you’re a member, some choose to defederate, we can ban bots, etc
Nothing is perfect, it’s always an ongoing struggle.
You can defederate from the corporate servers.
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.
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.
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.
The purpose of federation is to build a network that no one entity can control. An evil CEO can enshittify their own server, but the damage they would deal is limited to their server. The rest of the network would still exist outside of their control, and users can easily leave their server to go elsewhere.
