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.
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.
Nothing. Instances will have to take it upon themselves to defederate, just like how a lot of instances all decided to defederate from Threads.
Wait is Meta’s threads part of the Fediverse?
Kiiiinda, Threads users can opt-in to have their content syndicated out via ActivityPub (and be followed be mastodon users). I’m not positive but I believe it’s still only one-way, meaning Mastodon replies won’t show up on Threads. It’s basically an RSS feed.
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.
Microsoft have been endorsing Linux recently for this reason.
I doubt that’s still the reason, I think they endorse it because they’re making a shit ton of money using it on Azure.
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.
This is not what really happend. Yes initially they added features other XMPP implementations had trouble to catch up with, but the main problem was them not implementing important security features like s2s TLS encryption, thus forcing others to cut them off. Google continued to run their xmpp servers for many years after, but they were so badly maintained and insecure no one wanted to interact with them anymore.
The rest of the xmpp ecosystem continued to grow at a slow pace and is alive and well, it was just an annoying set back going from being able to contact many millions of users on their Gmail linked xmpp accounts to not being able to do that anymore.
Every time someone brings up xmpp and how Google extinguished it, I wonder if xmpp afterwards was somehow worse of than they would have been if Google never had embraced it. I don’t know, but my gut feeling would be that Google mostly just extinguished whatever they brought in in the first place and in that case EEE would be harmless. Am I wrong? If so, please explain.
Mostly yes, but people were a bit naive back then and many onboarded friends and family onto the Gmail service and that burned some bridges and good-will as for Gmail users other xmpp users simply ended up as if offline and never responding.
Fair enough. But maybe there were also people that were brought in by Google, that actually stayed after Google left again? Well, I guess it’s hard to say 🤷♂️
That’s about the only thing they can do with open-source things.
It helps, in the case of Linux, that it’s tightly gate-kept by Linus. Now when he steps down, I will worry for the project.
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.
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.
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…
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.
You can block Threads yourself even if your instance doesn’t
“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.
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.
We would find out. We would defederate them
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.
most ppl suck and have nothing of value to say, just go on threads and scroll for a bit, better yet go through ig and tiktok comments, too much awareness would be bad and drown out voices you want to hear
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 need a company for legal protection. There are too many idiots in this world who will try their best to sue you for no reason. The bigger you grow, the higher the risk. That’s why we have the Mozilla Corp and Linux Foundation: a company will pay a fine in the worst case scenario, but a private person behind the project is looking at a jail time.
Lack of interest from their part. Right now, they have nothing to gain, fediverse is “small fry”, and if the attacks could be traced back to them, they’d have to deal with the PR shitstorm
What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI?
They’re probably already doing that
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?
Silver screen?
Aye
Noice
Morley Turkish Golds!
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 🫠
Karma can be a useful trust signal, until it’s abused 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.
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.
I got you an AI-generated karma bot propaganda poster. No need to thank me.
Thank you. I’ll see myself out.
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.
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.
We just defederate.
And then they would create users in other instances to crossposts their shit, like ml and hex do.
Defederation isn’t really effective as it is right now (and I believe that’s by design).
If another instance started knowingly federating us ads, or fake content, I’d hit that defederate button very quick.
There’s nothing stopping them from hosting a massive instance. But people aren’t forced to move there to interact with them.
If it is corporate, I ain’t shit postin’
Nothing, but instances can defed from them if they wish and they can’t stop that either.
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.
We’ve already seen AI fall for obvious jokes, like whether you can melt an egg or put pineapple on pizza.
i have seen others hide prompts via small text and unicode characters that make invisible text. I imagine you could also use unicode characters that look exactly like normal characters, these characters then maybe messing with tokenization or something.
the problem is that any text that will fuck with AI scrapers, will also fuck with screen readers
Ah. did not realize that, thank you
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.
