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.

  • Hemingways_Shotgun
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    6 hours ago

    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.

    • James R Kirk@startrek.website
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      4 hours ago

      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.