this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
224 points (98.7% liked)

Fediverse

31689 readers
488 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Federation, no?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

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?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I get not wanting to expose people who don't want it to meta, tho.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There's nothing stopping them from hosting a massive instance. But people aren't forced to move there to interact with them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

If it is corporate, I ain't shit postin'

[–] [email protected] 68 points 4 days ago

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

load more comments
view more: next ›