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.
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.
This is comedy gold
more like comedy silver, amirite?
Silver screen?
Aye
Noice
Morley Turkish Golds!
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s nothing stopping them from hosting a massive instance. But people aren’t forced to move there to interact with them.
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.
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
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
Federation, no?
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.
I suspect the distributed moderation will help in the long run too.
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.
Nothing
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
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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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