9h ago

What is stopping corporations from hijacking the Fediverse by hosting massive servers?

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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If another instance started knowingly federating us ads, or fake content, I'd hit that defederate button very quick.

Nothing. Instances will have to take it upon themselves to defederate, just like how a lot of instances all decided to defederate from Threads.

The fact that corporations sees the fediverse as inconsequential. The minute people flood it in larger numbers as they are fleeing the corporate entshittified internet, that is exactly what they are going to do though.

Nothing, but instances can defed from them if they wish and they can't stop that either.

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI?
Nothing. And they already have.
What's stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities?
Moderation.
When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there.
Why would they do that when every instance has the same content?
Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads
I mean they can but no one would subscribe to them or share them, so no one would see them, so why would they bother making them?
about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.
Sometimes the two are actually one in the same.

Disruption: Probably ethics? I mean, I know big global businesses barely have any, but they do care about their reputation somewhat. Anyone running a botnet to destroy small/medium fediverse servers would be discovered fairly quickly, I suspect. Nothing is going to stop AI training scraping outside of regulation, I suspect.
Ads are enshittification. Federation is defense against it, because it prevents vendor lock-in and allows migration while maintaining your network effect. Threads already tried to join, and nearly nothing of theirs gets through. I'm on a mainstream mastodon service that doesn't block threads, and I've seen a threads post only once or twice. Threads can't display their add on my service, so there's no incentive for them to push content.

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI?
That very real and enforceable "this comment cannot be used to train AI" crap some people add to every comment that definitely makes bots not scrape the comment, of course!
- But that can poison the AI to some degree.
  
  Kinda? Not really, though. If anything it, the model's response would just include "anti-commercial license" at the end and they'd get rid of that with further training
  
  Most likely someone at the AI company would catch it and filter those strings out of the training data.

Lack of interest from their part. Right now, they have nothing to gain, fediverse is "small fry", and if the attacks could be traced back to them, they'd have to deal with the PR shitstorm
What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI?
They're probably already doing that

Thankfully, there aren't any ads here. Just the thought of it stresses me out, and when I get stressed out, I reach for a Morley cigarette to keep my cool. The toasted tobacco and asbestos filter make for a smoother smoke, which soothes the throat. 9 out of 10 anti-ad, Fediverse, activists choose Morleys to keep up their pep and vigor in the fight against advertisement.
- This is comedy gold
  
  more like comedy silver, amirite?
  
  Morley Turkish Golds!
- Legendary comment, take your internet points
  
  thats another thing. no internet points, so no bots to farm them. upvotes really only indicate the quality of the post or comment that receives the upvotes. no way to use the total number of points to claim validity of your posts or to brag with them.
  that being said, at one point we will need to figure out a way to identify and prevent bots that just post propaganda. while we wont have the problem of karmawhoring bots, they dont have the need to karmawhore and can try to spread their propaganda immediately.
  
  Thank you. I'll see myself out.

We would find out. We would defederate them

Nothing

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
Nothing stops them right now. Currently they're causing effective DDOS by scraping manually and there's no good way to block them except by going to extremes.
In fact, I would prefer if they just used their own instance to scrape content instead of causing downtimes like they do now.
Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:
For that, the solution is simple, we can defederate.
- I'm new and still trying to learn. What would defederating imply? An instance being blocked by all other instances?
  
  Federation is where one instance “talks” to another and exchanges content. If your instance isn’t federated then you’d just be stuck with your own content and members with no outside interaction.
  
  No, defederation just means 1 instance chooses to stop communicating with another instance.
  
  An instance being blocked by all other instances?
  No, defederating is just a single instance blocking another instance, not the entire fediverse doing so.
  
  Exactly. See also Gab and Truth Social.

We just defederate.
- And then they would create users in other instances to crossposts their shit, like ml and hex do.
  Defederation isn't really effective as it is right now (and I believe that's by design).

Facebook tried and we scoffed.
It's called the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy of dealing with threats. Microsoft have been endorsing Linux recently for this reason.
- Yes, except that you can't really do that with open source things. If one instance/a particular piece of software gets compromised, you can always spawn a new one / fork a new project etc.
  
  EEE was designed for open standards/projects.
  For example, google talk originally used xmpp. They kept adding features that broke on the xmpp side of things, until people effectively used google talk. They then cut of xmpp, after successfully killing it.
  
  That's about the only thing they can do with open-source things.

1 - You can block/ignore entire instances. (spamming ones)
2 - If it gets big enough, you'll see legit instances band together and federate only among themselves (white-list, invite only to allow federation)
people will gravitate to these groups of instances if they are well moderated and keep that crap out.

There's no economical incentive to join the fediverse for large corporations - at least not yet. I think it'll take another 5 years before that happens.
The !boycottusa@lemmy.ca and !buyeuropea@feddit.uk movements would have to become mainstream first, because let's be honest, the fediverse is the actual contender to US social media. Although, right now it's really fediverse vs bluesky. Once someone creates a reddit clone on top of bluesky, then the fediverse will lose that battle, because people are uncomfortable with choice.

They are already training on the fediverse. If something is on the public web, you can assume it's in some training data somewhere
- Wish ^there was a _way to ~~easily~~ poison the input
  But sadly this'll just be reality. The only thing we can do is either not use it or embrace it.
  
  We’ve already seen AI fall for obvious jokes, like whether you can melt an egg or put pineapple on pizza.

You can defederate from the corporate servers.

Everything posted on the public web is potential AI training data, federation is completely irrelevant to that.
The rest of your questions has the simple answer that a priori there is nothing "stopping" any of that. You should choose an instance whose admins are looking out for things like that and keeping your experience enjoyable, banning spambots or defederating from spambot farms when they are discovered.

Threads is trying to become that. We have a list of instances blocking Threads here: https://fedipact.veganism.social/
- Reminder that LW does not block Threads.net : https://lemmy.world/instances
  
  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.

Well for the me reason there aren’t as many troll farms operating here in comparison to reddit. There are just not enough users here yet.
- Yeah I think that’s a big factor, we’re just not a big target and relatively obscure.
- I suspect the distributed moderation will help in the long run too.

You’re potentially right, which is why for my own account I host my own instance. Which I truly understand is not for everyone.
When it comes to communities themselves, that’s a bit more difficult but I am hoping that we (the ‘inhabitants’ of the Fediverse) will ignore those attempt and actively block their instances if it does become a “threat”.
For scraping, I made this point before in a different post, but: the internets public, if we do not want to get scraped, stay in private local communities. The public nature of most communities means you’re out of luck trying to block scraping altogether.

Not much to do against scraping. On a small (but actively moderated) instance, a spamming bot will easily be detected and hopefully suspended. Generally, moderation is often better on smaller instances, so I'm not too worried about people migrating towards bigger instances - usually it's the other way round.
For 2. - dedicated corp instances will be defederated from many instances quickly. Bridge accounts on other instances need to be dealt with by the mods.
Yes, of course this can increase moderation effort. But spam accounts are way more easy to deal with from a moderation perspective than issues between real human users which usually takes wayyy more effort to deal with.

Nothing. Except that they don't give a shit. Fedi population is tiny and irrelevant.
Let me put it into perspective. Currently Fediverse as a whole has around 50k daily active users and 1.3m monthly active users split between multiple services with Mastodon being the most active. These are the stats for something that exists for over a decade.
I used to work in a company making some social media products. When we launched our main product we had 1m daily active users within a month and I don't remember how many monthly users (that was over 10 years ago). And it just grew from there.
Facebook Threads has 100m daily active users now. The whole Fediverse is a tiny echo chamber and no one cares or knows about its existence.
- Its sad that we are so tiny but its also a blessing that we have this corner of the internet to ourselves
  
  Well, nothing is sad on its own, it all depends on the priorities of people behind. If the priority is to keep Fediverse small and under the radar, then everything is going great.

This in my opinion shouldnt be viewed as a bad thing. If they do then they are joining the fediverse and bringing all their walled garden content over to an open protocol. If this happens we still have the power to choose a server that does not federate with them while their users also have the choice to move to a server that better aligns with their values.
If a big tech company hosted a server and participated like a good citizen then it should be welcomed but if they federate ads then everyone would criticize them and defederate.

As long as it's online and public they can acces the info. But we have tools to fight back. Some instances are private unless you're a member, some choose to defederate, we can ban bots, etc
Nothing is perfect, it's always an ongoing struggle.

Smaller instances, being smaller are actually easier to moderate and have and easier time detecting those things than then bigger ones. Small instance many times are small, not because they're new but because they heavily moderate who can belong to their server and federate with their content.
It's the biggest instance that tend to have worst quality of moderation, thus being more at risk of things like AI scraping or bots.
There's a reason people who practically have been on the fediverse from the very beginning tend to tell you to avoid flagship and massive instances; those are a moderation nightmare, both to their own admins and to other intances' admins.
2- Most fediverse software have tool to block AI, bots and ads.
On what's stopping corporations from taking over the Fediverse....We are. Our ability to decide whom we federate with is stopping corporations from taking over.

The purpose of federation is to build a network that no one entity can control. An evil CEO can enshittify their own server, but the damage they would deal is limited to their server. The rest of the network would still exist outside of their control, and users can easily leave their server to go elsewhere.

Nothing? In practice, if this were to happen on a noticeable scale it would mean Lemmy has gone mainstream. That said, within a federated system, it's entirely possible to create isolated, defederated webrings - for example, networks consisting solely of invite-based instances. If something like this becomes a necessity, it might lead to formation of multiple such webrings and they might even decide to federate with each other someday.

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