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With Reddit flirting with requiring Age verification, the next Rexit might be around the corner, are we ready? (piefed.social)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
243 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

With previous Rexit's like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.

What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?

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[–] 45 points 7 months ago (11 children)

We need more cat forums.

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  • [–] 49 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    This. Video games too. And porn for that matter. We're overall a little weak on the trifecta of primary internet subject matter.

    At least we're solid on owls though, my enduring admiration to our dedicated owl posters.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    Unironically this. We need cute animals. Cats, owls, moths, capibaras, pangolins. If we're not gonna have one of the two "true movers" of the internet (porn and correcting people who are wrong) we need something good to compensate.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago*

    I've genuinely been thinking about starting nsfw fandom (anime/games) communities centered around more female or queer orientated audiences but I don't know if I'll want to deal with moderation and having to keep it active...

    Edit: I also wish we had more silly mini comms of things. I have a family member who finds a new cat sub like every week, but we don't really have that here.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    there are a lot of video game communities already

    honestly too many lol, luckily PieFed has feeds to help this issue https://piefed.social/f/games

    there's even more if you include the more specialized communities https://piefed.social/f/allgames

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    • [–] 152 points 7 months ago (19 children)

    we need more hornyposting and leftist infighting

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  • [–] [S] 26 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I hate being left wing sometimes https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    Well, we have seen that when right wing disagrees, they go to the extreme and fucking shoot each other a la Charlie Kirk and that guy who tried to shoot Trump, so...

    Byt yeah perfect is the enemy of good...

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (8 children)

    I avoid harshly criticising the left, while continuing to do so for liberals (but still being welcoming for the; the wider the antifascist front, the better), and outright rejecting far-right.

    Keep in mind that infighting was often initiated by the CIA, in order to undermine the Black Panthers. Likewise we may see such attempts.

    i encourage party vanguardists to support anarchists and other free leftists. the stronger the left, the better

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    do you think the same is true for the hornyposting?

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (6 children)

    my perspective? nah, hornypost all you want (keep it to nsfw communities tho if it's "hard" nsfw as opposed to "soft") - that makes it easier to sort.

    or use a nsfw tag for the post

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    no i meant do you think it's the cia doing it

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago*

    the cia would try anything, but hornyposting isn't their main thing. They'd try that with high-profile individuals.

    I recall them having made a fake sex video of Sukarno (the first leader of Indonesia), and trying to blackmail him. Upon seeing it, he said he was delighted and wanted more, lol. Here's a source.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    This. Tagging is so important... In my opinion we could use some more tags to sort stuff. At least some nsfl and politics tag.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    For politics I just use a keyword block. If it contains terms related to that orange or such, I block.

    Piefed does have a nsfl tag option, a bot filter, as well moving communities to another instance.

    Imho, those are the three big things that most fediverse places should have. Being able to move to another instance is a gamechanger, should an instance disappear or get seized by asshats.

    I would actually make the bot filter on by default. Is this the case?

    For piefed, my main criticisms are these;

    Voting Privacy – Votes can be private (not federated); in meme communities, upvotes don’t affect reputation (optional).

    Enabling private votes may make it easier for bots, but as these votes are not federated, it should not affect what other users see, I think. Upvotes not affecting reputation in meme communities is an issue because this way someone could make a far-right community and call it a meme community, and get off scot-free. How do Piefed devs tackle this?

    Likewise;

    Default Comment Collapsing – Comments at -10 score or below are collapsed automatically.

    Low Reputation Indicator – Identifies consistently downvoted users.

    This can be an issue, with bots en masse downvoting comments to have them be less visible. How is it ensured that the bot filter would work, without far-reaching measures like "age verification"?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Nothing will ever be truly perfect, it is rather an arms race where defenders construct barriers while attackers jump those hurdles - often easily but it does act as a barrier and some bad actors simply give up rather than do so.

    In this case, PieFed has several relevant options, one being a per-community setting that only counts subscribed members of the community, which has the effect of reducing the impact of drive-by downvoters from All, but obviously won't stop a coordinated attack vector. The former scenario is real though, so the feature has actual benefits despite not stopping everything bad that could possibly happen, as it does improve the state of things incrementally.

    Another such feature is the option to only count votes from "trusted" instances. This allows for finer-grained control so that e.g. you could remain federated with an instance, but not allow them to constantly brigade your content. Obviously someone could make accounts on trusted instances to do so, but the subscriber numbers being so low overall for the entire Threadiverse and for Piefed specifically seems to suggest that if it is happening, it is not a huge deal (yet). And the usual measures still apply, e.g. if an account only ever downvotes without ever posting or commenting, then it is likely a brigade account in (a not very decent) disguise.

    Sometimes they will get more sophisticated, like repositing comics that seems an easy way to quickly generate many upvotes for the new account. But these seem to be shut down quickly... somehow, and anyway at that point whatever their intentions ultimately were, at least they were positively contributing to the Threadiverse community in the meantime, haha!

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    [–] 33 points 7 months ago (32 children)

    As a new user (I started using PieFed 2 months ago), the UX can surely be improved, but I feel like the main issue is relative to how users are supposed to use the fediverse: I still don't have a clue on how the fediverse works and how to use it properly.
    And I'm motivated in learning to use it.
    But for someone who isn't motivated, it's a huge "no thanks, goodbye"

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I'm not sure what can really be done about that; the fediverse is, by its very nature, pretty complicated. It's at least as complicated as http or email, and those things are widely used but probably not that well understood by the average person.

    I think people are accustomed to using things that they barely understand the inner workings of (car, microwave, computer, etc.) during their daily life. So, I guess my question is, to what degree do people need to know "how the fediverse works" in order to use it?

    If anything, we probably have to change the way we talk about the fediverse to make it more streamlined for people. For example, instead of suggesting that people "join lemmy", it would be better to send them directly to a specific instance that we would like to see grow.

    Then there's the friction of actually joining an instance. Some instances won't let users view content without registering, and some require you to "apply" for registration, pending approval. Both of those things are reasonable and justifiable, but at the same time I think they do create a barrier of entry that we may not want if we are going to try to attract more users.

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  • [+] 13 points 7 months ago* (3 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    There's just one little hurdle: choose an instance when joining. Maybe it could just be some sort of "choose for me" and every instance gets equal new users, random. Of course with the option to "nope, I'll choose instance myself". Everything else is technical and a casual new user shouldn't be bothered very much by it. Some are very interested and dig in to the knowledge, some just want to scroll cat pictures and call it a day, and that is fine too.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It reminds me of this:

    image https://lemmy.zip/post/47438646

    But yeah making the process of signing up and using the fediverse easier for users will go a long way. As much as I dont like bluesky, one thing they did right over Mastodon is making the sign up process dead easy for end users.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Sure, but Bluesky did that by not really being federated at all, especially during the early rush.

    Bluesky is certainly a step or two better than Twitter, but I would imagine it's still de facto centralized around the main bsky.social server, as that's what the vast majority of users are probably using.Nowadays it's getting more federated, but it seems to still be very far behind where ActivityPub is.

    So they avoided the challenges of federation by not really being federated in the first place. Mastodon doesn't have that luxury, since it was fully federated and self-hostable from the start. There was no half step and nobody else to copy.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (11 children)

    it's weird that, because once you're in it's basically seamless. it's just that first step of picking a server based on your interests that trips people up, because aren't you supposed to pick interests after you get in? more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I have never understood the importance of choosing an instance, especially at the beginning. Sign up for any one, try it for a while and if you need to change later, you can do so without problems.

    On sites like mastodon where followers are essential it can be a problem, in lemmy where karma is not even accumulated, changing servers does not make you lose more than the 5 minutes it takes you to do it

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.

    That's roughly how I chose my instance... I thought I'd choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn't know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn't (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I'd be participating mostly in remote ones. :D

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    yeah but, again, it's seamless. my instance only hosts content in swedish, but that's not really a problem. sorting by scaled means i still see things that happen locally mixed in with everything else.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    More instances with minimal/no defederation would help. That way you can just tell people to pick one of those instances and it doesn't matter which one.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    i mean maybe. i initially chose one of those instances for mastodon, but it turns out when you don't defederate from anyone, others defederate from you because you act as a proxy for the nazis and pedos to reach other instances. so i couldn't talk to my friends. it's a bit of a hassle.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    PieFed.zip is very new-user friendly (see very minimal instance block list). I don't see the requirement for an endless barrage of new instances being a blocker - the amount that we have now is sufficient to handle far more capacity than the entire Threadiverse is currently capable of demanding from the servers.

    Quite the opposite: most stories I see about people talking about the Threadiverse is how toxic AF we are, and elitist leftists, not welcoming to liberal centrists e.g. in the USA. So if the goal were to bring on more people from Reddit (setting aside for the morning edit: moment whether that is truly a worthwhile aim), then more censorship of toxicity is what would more readily make that happen, not less moderation. e.g. one glance at hexbear and your average Redditor will never come back here again:-P.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I disagree, you def would need to block the worst places. A good new-user friendly instance would block far-right and authoritarian content.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago*

    PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach: it blocks the most controversial instances but not as defederations i.e. at the instance level, and instead does so automatically for every new account upon sign-up, then sends the user a message explaining how to remove that block. From there they can unblock, reblock, back and forth as they choose at will. It thus makes federation with hexbear and Lemmygrad as opt-in rather than opt-out or obligatory or neglected as all other instances across the Threadiverse do.

    I do not recall if it does this for lemmy.ml as well - I would suspect not, sadly, but then again it would be fairly unique in that respect if it did, as virtually no major instances do so.

    And as far as far-right instances, those do not really exist, though nonetheless the historical ones are in the defederation list (exploding heads, freespeechextremists, and ofc threads.net:-P), and surely over time new instances could be added as well.

    Finally I will add that I've never seen the tiniest hint of documentation for any of this - not in https://piefed.zip/defed_policy, or the welcome messages in their !announcements@piefed.zip or !home@piefed.zip local communities, and now I don't see their listing anywhere in the instance picker site, despite trying multiple host instances of that including themselves. I only know about this since I too questioned how Newbie-friendly any instance was that federates with the above-mentioned pair, and the instance admin told me about this, but even now months later I still don't see an official description written down about this somewhere easily accessible by people.

    The Threadiverse is still very much a Work-In-Progress! But... it's getting better, and PieFed.zip is a major part of that progress, it looks to me.

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  • [–] [S] 25 points 7 months ago* (5 children)

    I think we should just hide all of that complexity and just set defaults for everything that the user can decide to change if they want. You don't have to understand how the Fediverse works to be able to use it. Most people don't understand how email works, they just use it.

    BlueSky has 40+ million users, and it's also technically decentralized like the Fediverse.

    aka. you can use the eurosky.social or bluesky.social server etc.

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Can BlueSky really be called decentralized when 99% of it is bluesky.social?

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  • [–] [S] 15 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    No, that's why I said it's technically decentralized.

    They have 40 million users though, they focused on UX first, and will now hopefully not be dicks and actually become decentralized

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Not a chance unfortunately, bluesky doesn't work without an all-seeing-eye that brings people the content they want. At best there will be some satellites running on atproto, fully decentralized, but the core will still be bluesky and it will still be completely centralized

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    It's not decentralized although it tried really hard to be.

    I don't want to google/remember the exact details but IIRC basically they run a centralized identity server that is impossible to avoid. At best, you can set up an island instance that doesn't federate with BlueSky proper (like Truth Social vs Mastodon).

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    What do you think about https://phtn.app/ ? Sadly the PieFed support is in Beta for quite a while now, but I do like how clean everything looks. You can also hide away a lot of the complexity but I am not sure if that is the default.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I didn't know it, and I'm trying it. The UX is really nice, though I don't understand why I needed to submit the reasons why I wanted to subscribe, and why I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities... But thanks for the suggestion!

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    That is odd, normally you are only asked for a reason when you sign up for a new account and not when you just subscribe to a community. Can you share the community you were trying to subscribe?

    I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities That is unfortunately in the nature of the decentralization. Your instance cannot be sure that that the instance the community is on will respond in a timely fashion so it shows it as "pending". The only thing we could maybe do about this is to be overly optimistic. Most requests to subscribe a community go though without a problem so we could just show it being subscribed even though are are not, but that would introduce other problems.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    My bad choice of wording, they asked me for reasons during sign up, not subscribing to communities. Anyway, thanks for the explanation, any chance you can share also android apps? I'm currently using Summit linked to my PieFed account

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    Im not sure if you are aware but you do not have to create a new Account on there. Photon is another client just like Summit is, so you can login using your piefed.social account. Sadly im not on android anymore but will be coming back soon! There are couple to choose from, just from the looks i like sync and interstellar but im not sure how well they support piefed. Lemmy was first so it was first supported.

    https://join.piefed.social/docs/piefed-mobile/ https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    I'd explain it like this. I hope that that works.

    An easy analogy

    View the fediverse like a few forests, linked by many wild bridges. PieFed might be one forest, Peertube and Mastodon yet other ones. These forests have a lot of different trees.

    An instance is like a single tree. And a community a branch. Users are leaves. You can help keep the tree alive, by giving donations as nutrition.

    Some parts of the fediverse allow leaves to move and join another tree.

    Traditional social media, on the other hand, are comparable to a single, isolated and big tree, far away from other trees. You cannot jump to other trees, and cannot easily go to a forest.

    More technical explanation

    Social media are built on 'protocols'. Protocols tell for example social media what they can do and how to 'talk' to each other.

    The Fediverse is a group of social media that use ActivityPub, Diaspora, or AT Protocol. These three protocols allow something special that 'traditional' social media like Facebook and Instagram don't: they can communicate across each other, without using a centralised server for hosting content.

    It's comparable to email; you can mail to someone not using your mail provider, and vice versa.

    On one of these fediverse social media, people self-host or join a self-hosted group. Such a group is called an 'instance'. Each instance functions independently and can have its own policies.

    Instances (and users) can decide with which other instances they allow their own content to be seen. They can also decide what instances their users can see content from. An instance that is connected to another instance is said to be 'federated' with the latter. If that is not the case, they are 'defederated'. Instances are supported through donations.

    Within each instances, there are many communities. There's a community for Linux, a community for cat pictures, a community for nature, and so on. Users can subscribe to many of them, receiving their content.

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    • [–] 27 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    From a technical standpoint: No.

    I'm on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I'd chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.

    Even the biggest instance I've ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there's a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.

    The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.

    And because of those technical issues...

    New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that's already around can't keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.

    From an end-user standpoint: Also no.

    The "culture" would shift practically overnight. I've already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don't do as good a job as I should.

    While the Fediverse may be "strong" overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah IMO getting popular ruined reddit.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    May I ask what your prior instances were?

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    It's been so many over the years and I really don't recall the names of a lot of instances I've been on. I'm here on .zip because .wtf was having major stability issues a while back. Every time I'd get on, it was down. This happened for days/weeks at a time and I got irritated. Prior to that it was .world, similar story. Lots of stability issues on days and times I'd normally try to hop on there. Plus there was an update fiasco, or some other issue I don't recall, that took it down for a bit. Prior to that I was on one of the kbin instances that is gone entirely now.

    I don't recall the first instance I joined when I first signed up. I had read that new folks should help spread the load by going to lesser used instances instead of all signing up for the big ones. That first instance was only around for maybe a couple of months. There was one that used the "magazine" concept for subscriptions, maybe kbin, I dunno.

    As I said, it's been a lot and I've been around long enough that I can't recall all the names. Plus, the kicker to all this? Those site status trackers are highly, highly unreliable. When lemmy.world was down, at one point for like a full day or so, the site monitoring link showed all green. It's one reason I stopped even bothering to try and troubleshoot on my end in case it's something I've done because that started to become a major waste of my time.

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    • [–] 69 points 7 months ago (11 children)

    Probably more NSFW instances? We barely have one.

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  • [–] 35 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    I don't think anyone actually wants the baggage that ecosystem comes with. Like, when it's working well it has baggage. And you wouldn't like it when it doesn't run well.

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  • [–] 43 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    I think so as well. Porn is available in abundance. We don't really need it here. What I think could be nice is people who like to write erotic fiction as a hobby and post their original content. Or people discuss erotic computer games. Or like relationship advice and NSFW questions in case some country abolishes sex ed. Maybe talking about piracy, mental issues, loss... all the things that are deemed "not advertiser friendly" on commercial platforms. That'd be something positive. But it's not easy. And it often all gets lumped together under some big NSFW umbrella and 95% of people want to share pron clips anyway. Mostly with zero care for copyright or the creators' consent.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    I guess the longstanding assumption is that any media that succeeds must also succeed with porn. It’s been true for every major media technology innovation before from the printing press to VHS. However some may confuse the causal direction of this. Having porn won’t necessarily make something succeed.

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  • [+] 6 points 7 months ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago*

    Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they're gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again.

    But I guess it's still a single point of failure. If they don't properly ensure there's several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there's legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of all of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance. And due to the delicate nature of NSFW content, they probably can't afford to be 100% transparent with us, so I wouldn't know whether they're in a healthy place or not.

    I mean there's nothing wrong with FediNSFW's existence. I just think it's massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the "Fediverse", a decentral platform...

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    You hear that people? Go set up a camera and show us your genitals! But also, be hot. Or at least interesting. Maybe learn to juggle as you give a blowjob. That'd be fun to watch! If you can do that, the world needs to see it. So why not put it on Lemmy? For the Fediverse!!!

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    Hehe. Yeah, I don't think we need more content. There's already some out there. And everyone can add more, all they need is 20sec of time and a redgifs link. What we really need is more admins run servers to host that stuff. And a bigger admin team for the already existing instance so it doesn't just randomly go away along with all the content, as well. Maybe one or two lawyers, or someone with expertise in bullet-proof hosting, to set it up properly. (And we likely need moderators as well. Half of the communities on the old server used to be a desert. Claimed en masse by some nominal members who left a long time ago.) But original content is certainly welcome 😆

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I wish there was more of an active gaming community.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    there are a lot of video game communities already

    honestly too many lol, luckily PieFed has feeds to help this issue https://piefed.social/f/games

    there's even more if you include the more specialized communities https://piefed.social/f/allgames

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    Yeah, me too. For some hobbies there just isn't a lot of activity.

    We have some regular pc gaming communities:

    And some about tabletop games:

    Not sure if there's more, that's about the ones I'm aware of. Lemmyverse.net has a few more: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=gam

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    • [–] 22 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    When I switched during the API blackout, the first issue I ran into was just a lack of content. That's definitely been resolved since. I think at this point it just comes down to how well they can pick up on the concept of the fediverse, and picking an instance.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    The only way lack of content still pervades is in niches. If I specifically like Game X, chances are worse than not that there's no activity in the community built for that one game.

    Basically, I guess I need to write 8 alt-account posts/memes complaining about how the Ghoul is overpowered in Dead by Daylight.

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    • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Only way there is a mass rexit is if the bot accounts get fed up and leave.

    Can't say I'm looking forward to swarms of bot accounts descening on Lemmy

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    They are already arriving to some degree.

    The difference being is that Lemmy and other similar services have zero controls or ability to handle bots or bop traffic if those bots were bots from 2014.

    Not bots from today.

    It's a bit of a problem and honestly with increasing bot traffic across the internet and fedaverse being extremely vulnerable to it It's absolutely bat shit insane, but I don't see any other option than somehow having some form of human verification.

    It's a problem

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  • [+] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    It's largely considered ineffective these days. Detecting elements that don't affect layout is trivial, or elements that are occluded, transparent....etc

    Capchas are one of the best options. But even then, LLM users bypass those relatively easily, and LLM users are one of the biggest risk areas for astroturfing.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Human verification? As in "give us your photo" or something?

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    I mean, fundamentally, yeah.

    But we live in a corporate controlled, corrupt, world and now of these larger companies can be trusted with this process.

    Some smaller communities and platforms DO this right sometimes, as they build in house processu that respect privacy. But governments world wide are making this impossible through increasingly strict compliance requirements that actually increase data privacy risks and funnel these needs to 3rd party services who just lie about what they do with the data.

    ===========

    I'm not kidding when I say this is a REAL BIG PROBLEM.

    bot based traffic and astroturfing will supplement and replace human communication on platforms like Lemmy. Driving the narrative and how we engage to the whims of a few rich people. Bots are relatively cheap, and easy to deploy at scale across many platforms.

    There will be no open corner of the internet safe from manipulation and forced division. More people will be forced into walled gardens from corps that implement human verification, as they are the only ones with the resources to do something (While also being the source of the problem, see how that works?)

    How do you carve out spaces that are protected from that? Well, you need to determine who's a bot, and who's and actual person.

    But we can't do that, so the alternative is we are ran over by bots and astroturfing till we're at each other's throats like good culture war puppets.

    The future is bleak....

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Answer, in my opinion, is local communities.

    Perhaps it's a bit of nationalist of me, but I think we are flooded daily with unnecessary information about what happens in other countries. In my personal opinion a random person from, say, Berlin or Paris shouldn't be bombarded daily with news about another school shooting in backwater american town. Nor should they know what happens in politics of each other nations.

    A community of my town would be useless for bots, especially if it banned all politics and ads from beyond my town. Elections of president? No dice, the only elections we care about is our mayor.

    I do not live in USA. I shouldn't know about Trump as much as I do, I shouldn't be talking daily to americans. What relationships could I form with them? We will never go together to restaurant, bar, bowling alley etc. But place where my countrymen, and americans, and french, and germans etc. are herded together is the best place for bots.

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    • [–] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Well, from a technical standpoint I am more prepared as an instance admin compared to Summer 2023. We're running on powerful dedicated hardware after all.

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