this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Fediverse

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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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

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[–] Skelectus@suppo.fi 17 points 3 hours ago

If another instance started knowingly federating us ads, or fake content, I'd hit that defederate button very quick.

[–] scytale@lemm.ee 39 points 5 hours ago

Nothing. Instances will have to take it upon themselves to defederate, just like how a lot of instances all decided to defederate from Threads.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 32 points 6 hours ago

Nothing, but instances can defed from them if they wish and they can't stop that either.

[–] uienia@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 5 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 14 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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!

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

But that can poison the AI to some degree.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

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

[–] psyspoop@lemm.ee 1 points 4 hours ago

Most likely someone at the AI company would catch it and filter those strings out of the training data.

[–] Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world 235 points 10 hours ago (8 children)

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.

[–] artificialfish@programming.dev 35 points 10 hours ago (2 children)
[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

more like comedy silver, amirite?

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[–] naught101@lemmy.world 6 points 5 hours ago
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 13 points 7 hours ago

We would find out. We would defederate them

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 50 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] totallyNotARedditor@lemm.ee 6 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

I'm new and still trying to learn. What would defederating imply? An instance being blocked by all other instances?

[–] Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

No, defederation just means 1 instance chooses to stop communicating with another instance.

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 8 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Exactly. See also Gab and Truth Social.

[–] totallyNotARedditor@lemm.ee 6 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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?

[–] moody@lemmings.world 9 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Not Lemmy specifically, but the broader fediverse (and probably mostly the microblog part dominated by Mastodon and its forks)

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Most of the core mastodon servers haven't blocked threads..

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 2 points 4 hours ago

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 🤷

[–] lol_idk@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

You can block Threads yourself even if your instance doesn't

[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 1 points 4 hours ago

An instance being blocked by all other instances?

No, defederating is just a single instance blocking another instance, not the entire fediverse doing so.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 74 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Ofiuco@lemmy.cafe -1 points 3 hours ago

And then they would create users in other instances to crossposts their shit, like ml and hex do.
Defederation isn't really effective as it is right now (and I believe that's by design).

[–] frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 64 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 5 points 6 hours ago
[–] ShadowRam@fedia.io 21 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 29 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

They are already training on the fediverse. If something is on the public web, you can assume it's in some training data somewhere

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[–] atro_city@fedia.io 8 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 15 points 9 hours ago

You can defederate from the corporate servers.

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