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.
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.
I get not wanting to expose people who don’t want it to meta, tho.
If another instance started knowingly federating us ads, or fake content, I’d hit that defederate button very quick.
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.
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.
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.
What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI?
That very real and enforceable “this comment cannot be used to train AI” crap some people add to every comment that definitely makes bots not scrape the comment, of course!
But that can poison the AI to some degree.
Kinda? Not really, though. If anything it, the model’s response would just include “anti-commercial license” at the end and they’d get rid of that with further training
Most likely someone at the AI company would catch it and filter those strings out of the training data.
I’ll sue them in small claims court as a pro se litigant demanding a jury trial. I will also try to file motions every other week, which will probably fail and ask the judge to give me time to correct them. I will make them waste thousands on attourneys fees and be a royal pain in the ass.
Good luck getting a court to hear it when you won’t have a shred of evidence to show
The fun part is that they have to and they give pro se litigants more leeway. It’s a huge pita.
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.
The fact that corporations sees the fediverse as inconsequential. The minute people flood it in larger numbers as they are fleeing the corporate entshittified internet, that is exactly what they are going to do though.
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Disruption: Probably ethics? I mean, I know big global businesses barely have any, but they do care about their reputation somewhat. Anyone running a botnet to destroy small/medium fediverse servers would be discovered fairly quickly, I suspect. Nothing is going to stop AI training scraping outside of regulation, I suspect.
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Ads are enshittification. Federation is defense against it, because it prevents vendor lock-in and allows migration while maintaining your network effect. Threads already tried to join, and nearly nothing of theirs gets through. I’m on a mainstream mastodon service that doesn’t block threads, and I’ve seen a threads post only once or twice. Threads can’t display their add on my service, so there’s no incentive for them to push content.
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Nothing
Federation, no?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got you an AI-generated karma bot propaganda poster. No need to thank me.
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.
Thank you. I’ll see myself out.
