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.
We would find out. We would defederate them
You can defederate from the corporate servers.
There’s no economical incentive to join the fediverse for large corporations - at least not yet. I think it’ll take another 5 years before that happens.
The !boycottusa@lemmy.ca and !buyeuropea@feddit.uk movements would have to become mainstream first, because let’s be honest, the fediverse is the actual contender to US social media. Although, right now it’s really fediverse vs bluesky. Once someone creates a reddit clone on top of bluesky, then the fediverse will lose that battle, because people are uncomfortable with choice.
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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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.
Nothing
