Everything on here is awesome right now, it feels like an online forum from the 2000s, everyone is friendly, optimistic, it feels like the start to something big.
Well, as we all know, AI has gotten very smart to the point captcha’s are useless, and it can engage in social forums disguised as a human.
With Reddit turning into propaganda central anda greedy CEO that has the motive to sell Reddit data to AI farms, I worry that the AI will be able to be prompted to target websites such as the websites in the fediverse.
Right now it sounds like paranoia, but I think we are closer to this reality than we may know.
Reddit has gotten nuked, so we built a new community, everyone is pleasantly surprised by the change of vibe around here, the over all friendlyness, and the nostalgia of old forums.
Could this be the calm before the storm?
How will the fediverse protect its self from these hypothetical bot armies?
Do you think Reddit/big companies will make attacks on the fediverse?
Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?
What are your thoughts and insights on this new “internet 2.0”?
Which of the following would you most prefer? A: A puppy, B: A pretty flower from your sweetie, or C: A large properly formatted data file?
unexpected !futurama
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.
Is the puppy mechanical in anyway?
Tbh, I’m less concerned with bots and more concerned with actual humans being dicks. Lemmy is still super new, relatively low traffic and kind of a pain to get involved with, but as it grows the number of bad actors will grow with it, and I don’t know that the mod tools are up to the job of handling it - the amount of work that mods on The Other Site had to put in to keep communities from being overrun by people trolling and generally being nasty was huge.
How’d Mastodon cope with their big surge in popularity?
This is why, unlike many others here, that Reddit has a long and successful existence. Let it be the flytrap.
The normies all went back to Twitter.
Greetings, fellow humans. Do you enjoy building and living in structures, farming, cooking, transportation, and participating in leisure activities such as sports and entertainment as much as I do?
d’ya catch that ludicrous display last noyt?
Being a decentralized federated network and all, I guess that any solution involving anti-bots bots can be implemented only on particular servers on the fediverse. Which means that there can also be bot-infected (or even zombie, meaning full bot servers) that will or will try to be federated with the rest of the fediverse. Then it will be the duty of admins to identify the bots with the anti-bots bots and the infected servers to decide their defederation. I also don’t know how efficient the captcha is against AI these days, so I won’t comment on that
We went through this with E-mail. There are mail server that gained popularity as being spam hubs. And they were universally banned. More and more sophisticated tools for moderating spam/phishing/scam providers and squashing bad actors are still being developed today. It’s an ongoing arms race, I don’t think it would be any different or any harder with the fediverse.
All the things you are concerned about are inevitable, it’s all in how we engage them that makes the difference.
We’re already seeing waves of bot created accounts being banned by admins. Mods are nuking badly behaved users. What is being caught is probably a drop in the bucket compared to what IS happening. It can be better with more mods and more tools.
Those issues are comming, and we will have to develop tools to fight against them.
One such tool would be our own AI that is protecting us, it can learn from content banned by admins and that info can be shared between instances. It should also be in active learning loop, so that it is constantly trained.
Sounds like the strart of a cheap SciFi movie.
Positively marking accounts that are interacting with known humans can also be useful, as would reporting by us.
We can call the AI “Blackwall”
Oh absolutely. One of the absolute worst things that plague social media platforms, ie spam bots, troll farms, and influence campaigns, they haven’t bothered to target Lemmy because no one was here.
But an influx of users means an increase in targets. In the same way we’re settling in an learning the platform, so are they. It’s gonna start ramping up real soon once they determine the optimal strategy. And the most worrying thing is, because of the way fediverse works, it is going to complicate combating them substantially.
That is maybe the biggest benefit of a centralized platform, and it’s a trade off we’re going to have to learn to accept and deal with.
I wonder if IP filtering would be ideal. Most companies and corporations have fixed IP blocks that they use so it seems viable to simply block corporate IP addresses by default from posting or to severely rate limit them. Then they would have to be in the larger IP user space to post more than say once an hour or once a day.
That’s obviously not a perfect solution, plus there are many people who are on vpns that would need to be whitelisted and it could actually negatively affect the user experience for some people but it would be a good kill switch to have in place the day the ad army attacks.
Aside from that you could also block links to specific locations, say anything that goes to meta or any of meta’s ip blocks gets automatically blacklisted so that in order to follow the link people would have to copy the text of the link and paste it into a browser, but that would require at least a level 5 regex wizard whose beard is no less than 7 in long to successfully pull off.
Ip style blocking just isn’t feasible. It’s very easy to get your IP changed in certain regions. I recall in a community where someone ban evaded so much in a third world country that banning him effectively meant banning an entire continent.
I just assume I am the only actual Human on the Internet, and the rest of you are all bots.
💀
No, you
I am a figment of your imagination.
(Imagine me with better hair, please.)
I knew since a long time that girls don’t exist on internet. I’m discovering that boys neither
Interesting questions.
Spam-bots attacks are already happening, it means the fediverse is already recognized as a valid alternative to big corporations, tho I don’t believe the fediverse is seen as a “threat” by them, not yet at least.
I don’t agree reddit is nuked, like twitter isn’t, they’re getting a blow for sure but they’ll live regardless.
People seeking honest interactions and quality discussions are a minority, the vast majority is content with shitposting and memes, many don’t even know what’s happening or don’t care, look at how little it took for the protest to wane, some subs are still protesting or migrating, but the majority reopened and they’re going on like nothing happened.
Admins can protect up from bot armies, they’re doing a good job already, it’s up to us to help them reporting when we see them.
Do you think Reddit/big companies will make attacks on the fediverse?
I don’t think so, it would be a waste of resources, they don’t see the fediverse as a threat, it’s true we’re growing but we’re still hundreds of thousands against hundreds of millions, different order of magnitude.
Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?
Clickbaiting will indeed start, if not already, but by users, not corporations, and drama stirring posts for views (that’s happening already), it can be contained by enforcing rules and having enough mods to deal with it IMO.
I’m more afraid of them becoming present and throwing their money around and repeating the cycle again.
If not for the reddit blackout, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Characterizing the recent action against reddit as an inconsequential 2 day blackout is inaccurate I think. Shitposts and memes are the content that exists independent of platform, it’s not what made Reddit popular.
Characterizing the recent action against reddit as an inconsequential 2 day blackout
Where did I say the blackout is inconsequential? I don’t believe that at all, it just won’t kill reddit, but it had indeed an impact, both on the platform and people.
I’m just trying to summarise to be concise, this part is what I was getting at
look at how little it took for the protest to wane, some subs are still protesting or migrating, but the majority reopened and they’re going on like nothing happened.
I disagree that “the majority reopened”, of a total proportion of subs that blacked out I think the majority are either blacked out or have not resumed operations as normal. This is different from a majority proportion of all subs, which is a much larger, and the majority of which also never participated in any blackout. Since the majority of traffic on reddit goes to a minority of subs, it’s not clear which metric you’re looking at or whether it’s meaningful in context.
Since reddit algorithms to some extent relied upon that consistent operating principle of posts in popular subs being boosted, initially the result of the blackout was extreme - the website could not functionally aggregate posts on most users frontpages with so many subs on private mode. But that is not a problem directly caused by the blackout, it’s caused by reliance on consistent data. So all reddit needed to do in that case was adjust the algo to significantly improve the average user experience during peak blackout. Instead of users seeing a bunch of posts about private subs they can’t interact with, they just get fed posts from subs that didn’t black out, so users could engage with reddit while an active ongoing protest was happening on the platform and might not even notice.
So I guess my point is that someone’s impression of how the frontpage looked at t+24hrs, or t+48hrs, or today, as an indication of how reddit’s going right now, is inaccurate because of the inherently subjective nature of the information visible from just browsing the platform.
I disagree that “the majority reopened”
https://reddark.untone.uk/ lists all the subs that took part in the protest (it lists only those who officially pledged to the protest), go look at how the situation is now, majority of subs are colored white, it means they reopened as normal, tho some of them are protesting in a different way (hilarious even).
my point is that someone’s impression of how the frontpage looked at t+24hrs, or t+48hrs, or today, as an indication of how reddit’s going right now, is inaccurate
Oh that I agree with, the frontpage is nowhere near a good indication of how the situation on reddit is, admins have been working really hard to hide what’s going on.
But that IMO brings the point to people who care or do not, I mean, all those who really care are abandoning ship, those who don’t (the majority IMO) are basing their experience on what’s shown on the frontpage, because they don’t care about going deeper than that, those users don’t even notice a protest is going on.
My personal compulsion to browse reddit certainly isn’t to think actively about the content I’m being fed, that’s kind of the whole point - here’s all the links you want spoonfed to you so you don’t need to seek them out. The algorithmic approach to content delivery is the core product, and it became popular because it is good method of consumption. But when content quality goes down on average, eventually you end up with a Facebook situation - those are the users that actually don’t care.
Thanks for the link, on the face of this I’m not sure if this really goes for or against my idea about the available metrics at hand not really being sufficient to make accurate/meaningful observations about the data. It certainly does feel to me like there’s an undeniably significant protest occuring on the platform now, even within the confines of established rules on reopened subs. And also datapoints not considered, such as subs which have been reopened by direct admin action, or under threat of it.
I don’t like to be “spoonfed” content either, but I believe people like you and me are a tiny minority of the entire reddit userbase.
Someone in another thread said the blackout, in which a significant amount of subs participated, lowered global reddit traffic by only 7%, that’s not insignificant but not that much either.
The blackout has been extremely useful, in my opinion, to make a lot of people aware of the real situation and about the existence of valid alternatives, but from the point of view of putting a dent in reddit global usage, it didn’t do much.
you end up with a Facebook situation
I deleted facebook from my life more than a decade ago and I couldn’t be happier about that, but there are still close to 3 billions of people actively using it every month, that’s a hell lot of people that doesn’t care, reddit is no different IMO.
Reddit’s rise to prominence is in part a result of emphasis on facilitating the discourse Facebook used to be a place for. Facebook as a venue for discourse has gradually ended over the past decade or so, for the majority that still use it it is now just a centralised email server for sending event invitations.
No one has global Reddit traffic data except for Reddit - market estimation methods can’t really account for a deviation from the norm on such a short timeframe. Regardless, it’s the users that matter that are gone, we agree on that. The same ones that made Reddit the safehaven for Digg users to begin with.
I don’t think Reddit is going the way of the Dodo, it’s Reddit as a platform for discourse I’m on my soapbox about. Probably the largest exchange of ideas in human history happened on it. But the writing is now on the wall, to continue posting you first need to overcome the internal conflict of putting stock in a platform whose killer use case was predicated on user goodwill now burned. That itself is enough of an obstacle to make folks disengage, skewing the userbase, post quality declines, and then it’s just another cesspool. All of this takes time though
Spam-bots attacks are already happening, it means the fediverse is already recognized as a valid alternative to big corporations, tho I don’t believe the fediverse is seen as a “threat” by them, not yet at least.
It doesn’t all have to be big corporations. All that really needs to happen is that spammers consider Lemmy communities big enough that they have a good chance of making money by spamming those communities.
I doubt that they really care all that much. Reddit’s CEO basically brushed off the blackout protests, saying that they would blow over. He’s probably not wrong there, unfortunately. Although some parts might leave for good, that would just be a tiny amount, and even the blackouts led to a 6.6% reduction in traffic. The proportion that did up and leave would be much smaller, at least for the time being. That may go up once the API changes go into effect.
Meta (Facebook) is testing an activity pub powered Twitter clone, big companies are knocking at the door.
I know, the difference here is that anyone on the fediverse is free to block them, there’s an initiative already: https://fedidb.org/current-events/anti-meta-fedi-pact
You wouldn’t be able to on a corporate platform.
Is activity pub GPL or mit?
ActivityPub is not software but is a open standard published by W3C, just like HTTP. Lemmy server software is AGPL3, which is GPL3 for network software.
Thank you, I didn’t know that. So there is nothing potentially stopping meta from developing something closed source on top of it?
I am a human with soft human skin. Do not run from bots. They are our friends.
Why, just why
Welp, I’m running as we speak
There’s a game about that: Horizon: Zero Dawn. Scary stuff.
Lets hope AI becomes even more advanced and smarter to have their own morals and join our fight, lol
Yes, exactly!
The way we filter spambots should actually be the same way we filter spam humans – Downvoting bad posts/comments of any type, and then banning those accounts if it happens regularly.
LMAO this is gold
Calm before the storm, sure. Most migration away from reddit (whether the migration ultimately proves to be consequential or not) will logically happen when the measures that made users migrate actually go into effect.
Either that or the community’s reaction to the 3rd party app thing was overblown. In the specific circumstances I don’t think it was.
That’s a more realistic clear and present danger to the platform IMO - an influx of actual users that makes the numbers to date pale in comparison.
The way the respective platforms handle bots is subtly different, but in a way that could result in profound changes either good or bad. But we haven’t actually seen that yet, and the software is still a work in progress. The existing migration has really lit a fire under the devs on issues that were identified years ago where progress has been slow, so for now I’m happy to let that play out and happy with what we’ve already got. I’m sure if bots become a bigger problem then that’s what devs will shift focus toward.
I thing we still have 2-3 years before we need to worry too much about that
Maybe, doesn’t hurt to be prepared though
Bots are already here without a doubt. The only questions are the ratio of users to bots and the sophistication of the bots.
Well, as we all know, AI has gotten very smart to the point captcha’s are useless, and it can engage in social forums disguised as a human
But for the time being, it is also too expensive to turn into a full-on spam bot.
With Reddit turning into propaganda central anda greedy CEO that has the motive to sell Reddit data to AI farms, I worry that the AI will be able to be prompted to target websites such as the websites in the fediverse.
Nah, they’re not going to. They have nothing to gain from that, and the Fediverse/Lemmy isn’t as much as a blip on their radar. Optimistically, so far, we might have ~1% of the active base, maybe even fewer. The whole protests, which basically took over the entire site, only caused a 6.6% reduction in traffic, and only a small proportion would go to, and stay on other Fediverse sites like Lemmy, or Kbin.
Reddit likes to think that it can sell the data to the AI sites, but I question how many of them are actually buying it. Similarly for the API. Most of them are likely just going to take from Reddit archives that already exist (since it’s neatly packaged up for them), or just scrape the site directly. The API limits are a bit too unwieldy/cumbersome for them, and having to accommodate the API would be a change in workflow.
Reddit data is also a bit junky anyway. How many of them are useless in-jokes, or people summoning other bots? That’s extra data that won’t help if you’re trying to train a language model on Reddit, and is more likely to hurt than not.
How will the fediverse protect its self from these hypothetical bot armies?
Realistically, it can’t, not with the current array of tools available. The current mod tools are too limited to deal with things like a spambot attack, never mind things like the possibility of spam instances being spun up to flood the network.
Defederation doesn’t mean much if the spammers can just spin up a new instance and continue barely hindered, and it seems to be the only tool that instances have to deal with things like that.
Do you think Reddit/big companies will make attacks on the fediverse?
No. They’re more likely to use it (it costs less), or just ignore it entirely. The amount of users that moved over from the Reddit protests, while enormous for Lemmy itself, is barely a blip on Reddit’s radar. The actual protests during the most active part of the lockdown accounted for a 6.6% drop in Reddit traffic, which is miniscule, and a much smaller proportion of those people will have joined Fediverse alternatives of their subs.
Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?
Ad Revenue isn’t the only reason for clickbait to exist, but yes, I don’t doubt that we’ll see it happen sooner or later. It’ll mostly be the Reddit kind, where it’ll try to farm votes, since click-throughs don’t matter on Lemmy or Kbin, and it’s things like votes and boosts that will.
What are your thoughts and insights on this new “internet 2.0”?
I like the integration with places like Mastodon, and it would be nice to extend that out all the way, but at the same time, it is clearly still in heavy development. If we got hit with a spam wave at the moment, we would struggle to do anything about that, same for spam instances, and all of that.
The Lemmy interface is a bit glitchy, and there’s not much by way of apps, which was one of the draws for people to go on social media on their phone in the first place.
There’s a few features that would be nice to have, but aren’t implemented yet, like being able to move accounts to other instance without having to recreate them, or just having one single account for all instances, like how Hubzilla has their “nomadic identity”.
I think the Fediverse will be able to combat (harmful) bots much more effectively. People are not running this place to sell stocks to investors, nor to sell data to advertisers, so we’re in better hands for now. I don’t know what the future will bring to us exactly, but it’ll be better as long as the Fediverse don’t go for-profit.
