i am a new user on the fediverse but what is the thing that in Big Social
but the fediverse is not prepared to replace
“Success” by which I mean a massive influx of millions of users: IMO it’s kind of in a sweet spot because it’s not as easy to use as most social media, so a lot of the dumber people just don’t come here because they can’t figure it out (for example, they think there’s nothing here because they don’t understand the filter/how instances work).
If things are made too easy, they’ll start showing up in droves and they’ll bring tons of reddit’s bullshit over here. More bots, spammers, scammers, malicious hackers, and trolls pretty much everywhere and the mod tools on Lemmy aren’t terribly advanced, which is one of the main forum platforms in the Fediverse.
I feel this is a good thing, kinda like linux, I got into it and I love it, at the beginning I wanted for linux to grow and grow in popularity to become huge and widely used, but then i realized this would also mean being on the sights of the big corporations controlling the market right now and goverments, and it may start to get regulated more or some bullshit they will cook up to hurt it and the people who use it to gain back the market share lost. I do want both linux and lemmy to grow more, but up to a point so they stay safe.
While i don’t disagree, large corporations have been large Linux contributors for quite a while now. FOSS means some oversight, but i worry some “control” could slip in there in ways people don’t notice.
Yeah unfortunately this happens with a lot of fun, cool projects as they gain in popularity. Linux is getting more “user friendly” to appeal to the lowest common denominator, for example.
That one I’m a lot less concerned about because there will always be more complex distros aimed at enthusiasts. Nothing wrong with using Mint, but there are lots of choices out there for everybody. Having something like Ubuntu exist doesn’t mean that stuff like Arch or Gentoo can’t be used anymore. Plus, it helps mitigate Microsoft’s monopoly on operating systems.
I’ll second this, after distro hopping a bit at the beginning I ended up choosing Mint, it works and with i3 its like 500mb of idle ram, so far I haven’t found any reason to switch to a less user friendly distro, I don’t know what the advantages would be in using a more complicated/prone to breaking distro instead of mint. I’m open to switching though if I find something I like more, but Mint is amazing as a gateway drug distro, made coming over to linux SO much better, now I’m slowly infecting my family computers with mint aswell, gotta spread the virus
I’ve been using various distros off and on since the late 90s: Linux has come a very long way and Mint is a great example of it if you ask me.
Doesn’t that just mean it will attract a certain type of user, where FOSS and tech are huge parts of identity? I’m not mocking that type of user at all, but honestly my primary use case for Reddit was shitposting in /r/cricket threads. There’s never going to be that sort of community, because frankly anyone not into tech would find this platform completely incomprehensible.
There are so many shitposting communities here, I find your take a little confusing. What am I missing? Do you mean because it’s cricket?
Yes because it’s cricket, E.g. during a live thread. It’s just an example. Outside of tech and American interests, there is actually very little of interest here for passive or casual users.
“The Fediverse, Assemble”
Fedi was built on the same premise that makes all tech products fail:
The idea that people will behave themselves and act in good faith.
They won’t, and they don’t. And it only takes a handful of bad actors to ruin it for everyone else.
The main thing the fediverse offered is a way to avoid any single admin from taking over the whole thing. One instance gets too dictatory, users can move to another instance and still have at least some of what they left behind. And because of that, it will limit the amount of money that capitalists are willing to spend on it because their purchase itself would turn the asset toxic.
But it’s otherwise still people running, moderating, participating, lurking, and automating here, and they cover the whole spectrum.
Idk, the moderation distribution helps, I think. I agree that it will become a problem for very large fedi servers, but that’s just an argument for increasing the number of small and medium servers
mods are people. people are corruptible.
Sure, and instances are defederatable if it becomes a problem.
sorry but i dont think so because since so does corporate social media has its own moderation issues
Spammers and other nefarious actors.
There’s a lot of trust built into federation.
To be fair, I encounter way more spammers and bots on corporate social media.
from what i heard the Twitter platform had issues with moderation
Success.
With success come the bots, trolls, and buyouts. All the big platforms started as places people liked to be. The enshittification always came after the success.
Mainstream popularity.
If lemmy becomes big enough to have a user base that is a substantial slice of the population as a whole, corpo will try to ruin it as it ruined the internet as a whole.
So far the attention has mostly been a couple of content bots from news sites, and big socials spinning up their own instances only to get defenerated immediately. Once more effort is seen as profitable, that’s when there will be a real problem with bots, ads camouflaged as content, astroturfing, and everything else that follows.
that’s what thread’s is doing literally mastodon needs to defederate from threads (i mean threats just joking)
Moderation of bad actors. Not just people who are assholes, or people who post spam, but I mean astroturfing and vote manipulation schemes that cross instances.
I’ve been followed around by a set of accounts who never post and never comment but downvote everything I comment. I have zero ways to report them directly. They were consistently downvoting a set of accounts including me and upvoting a different set of accounts. I DM’d 3 admins but the only attention I got was from a dedicated comm mod who could only ban them from a few comms and they talked to their admin on my behalf.
https://lemvotes.org/ paints a picture of a vote manipulation ring but all I could do was manually message people who couldn’t be bothered. I couldn’t care less they were downvoting me, I have nothing important to say, but the fake engagement around who they were boosting didn’t sit right with me.
This sort of sums up my experience: https://lemmy.zip/comment/29353636 and it’s corresponding https://lemvotes.org/comment/lemmy.zip/comment/29353636
Dealing with the avalanche of bot accounts.
Seen around the mod chat that instances with signup approvals are getting slammed with marketing people vometing llm bots everywhere.It’s not ready to really replace what it’s meant to replace.
I mean, people are told all of the time to make instances and make servers if the things they’re not seeing aren’t there. But there’s a problem, they’re only one person. It takes numerous people to make a community. The users we have on paper, would say that we have more than a capable amount to make these things possible.
But in practice and in activity, that’s not what we’re seeing. We can’t estimate how long exactly things will pick up as we are nearing 4 years into the fediverse. But we just know that how long it’s taking, we can expect that it’ll be quite a time before the fediverse even sniffs a quarter of activity the big social networks have.
ai bots
Yeah, they’ve left us alone so far because we’re small potatoes. It’s only a matter of time.
My nudes.
Spam and bots.
LOL.
Users. As soon as there’s enough MAUs to be worth manipulating, everyone will defederate, because we have not protection against this threat.
i think its not that way
due to probably it getting more decentralized so because a server may not handle 20k users correct those 20k will split and migrate to other servers
We’ve already seen some cases of instances get defederated because they hostrd several spam accounts and they didn’t have any safeguards to prevent spammers from creating a new account when a current one got banned.
Look at email. Effectively, a few major instances run email and dictate rules on interfacing with those accounts as a way of controlling spam. If you don’t follow their rules, your entire server gets blacklisted. I don’t see how any federated system won’t end up there.
Normies. I want decentralized social media to grow but to do that it needs people who aren’t self-selecting.
The legislation trying to mandate proof of identity from all users of all social media.
We’d need to diversify the locations of Fediverse servers so that there would be a place to easily migrate to if a server suddenly is forced to implement this demand – basically meaning it needs to be closed down.
well i am not from your nations but i hope that people could upload “Spongebob” ID’s and the AI fails to know its fake maybe
If an explosion of ai-based hacking bots causes servers to adopt a new tech for approving browsing based data requests, I wonder how quickly Lemmy can innovate into that system as well. As it stands the fediverse still hasn’t solved the problem of basically DDOSing a site when a post is made and all the instances call the same site for thumbnails and post text. I wonder if they’re prepared to follow any potential future changes in how those calls for data are even made to begin with, let along proliferating them amongst all instances.
