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.
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.