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”?
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.