What is stopping corporations from hijacking the Fediverse by hosting massive servers?
What is stopping corporations from hijacking the Fediverse by hosting massive servers?
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.
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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.
I'm new and still trying to learn. What would defederating imply? An instance being blocked by all other instances?
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
An instance being blocked by all other instances?
No, defederating is just a single instance blocking another instance, not the entire fediverse doing so.