Fediverse

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

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What is stopping corporations from hijacking the Fediverse by hosting massive servers? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Threads is trying to become that. We have a list of instances blocking Threads here: https://fedipact.veganism.social/

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Reminder that LW does not block Threads.net : https://lemmy.world/instances

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

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.

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

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.

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