from Maroon@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world on 12 Mar 08:20
https://lemmy.world/post/26713241
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.
threaded - newest
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.
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.
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 🤷♂️
EEE is a tool to steal users, not products. In the case of Microsoft, using EEE tactics with Linux is to convince people that they can stay on a Windows machine and get their work done, so they don’t need a Linux computer. In the Fediverse, thr value of stealing users is much more obvious.
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.
We just defederate.
.
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
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.
Yeah personally I like being able to follow Threads users without needing a Threads account or exposing my information to Meta and I honestly don’t understand the vocal opposition to that.
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.
Threads is trying to become that. We have a list of instances blocking Threads here: fedipact.veganism.social
Reminder that LW does not block Threads.net : 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.
Threads doesn’t have groups iirc.
I never see anything from threads anywhere… search results, cable news, etc. Who’s using it even?
Threads users cannot subscribe or post to Lemmy communities or follow Mastodon users (yet). Threads has a sort of halfway federation situation. Mastodon users can follow Threads users without having a Threads.net account but that’s it.
Also, the ability to allow Mastodon users to follow Threads accounts is opt-in, and only a small portion of users have chosen to do so.
You won’t see it on Lemmy because there is no way to follow individual users on Lemmy. Here’s an example of viewing a Threads user from my instance. There is no content because Kara cannot interact with Lemmy and Lemmy users can’t follow her.
On Mastodon, Threads accounts (or any account) won’t federate to your instance until you (or someone on your instance) specifically requests to follow. It’s a common misunderstanding when people think that federating with Threads.net will “overwhelm” a small instance.
Also, not every Threads account has opted into federation. So there’s really very little available content out there.
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.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f3ae4ff7-5e86-4ce3-8521-4d1e103583a7.gif">
This is comedy gold
more like comedy silver, amirite?
Silver screen?
Aye
Noice
Morley Turkish Golds!
Legendary comment, take your internet points
Thank you. I’ll see myself out.
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.
Count me in. Let’s have a “The Scarlet Letter II: Internet Boogaloo.”
PieFed does that.
I got you an AI-generated karma bot propaganda poster. No need to thank me.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/10164a5f-5b7c-451b-bffd-77e5533ece8b.jpeg">
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.
Who are you going to listen to? This guy?
Or Fred Flintstone?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f5cefb3f-3b2e-4e07-b3ad-ee50f97c4755.gif">
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.
Nothing? In practice, if this were to happen on a noticeable scale it would mean Lemmy has gone mainstream. That said, within a federated system, it’s entirely possible to create isolated, defederated webrings - for example, networks consisting solely of invite-based instances. If something like this becomes a necessity, it might lead to formation of multiple such webrings and they might even decide to federate with each other someday.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Threads accounts (or any account) won’t federate to your instance unless you (or someone on your instance) specifically requests to follow. It’s a common misunderstanding when people think that federating with Threads.net will “overwhelm” a small instance.
You can block Threads yourself even if your instance doesn’t
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Yeah I think that’s a big factor, we’re just not a big target and relatively obscure.
Size has not much to do with it. If a hypothetical instance allowed a “troll farm” to set up shop there, sane admins on other instances would de-federate from the one that allows trolls pretty quickly.
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.
You can defederate from the corporate servers.
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.
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.
We would find out. We would defederate them
Nothing
Nothing, but instances can defed from them if they wish and they can’t stop that either.
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.
Most likely someone at the AI company would catch it and filter those strings out of the training data.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
They’re probably already doing that
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. And they already have.
Moderation.
Why would they do that when every instance has the same content?
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?
Sometimes the two are actually one in the same.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
Federation, no?