I don't know if this is quite the same thing, but @kersploosh was waging a war on bot accounts. Maybe they have some inside or can come up with something in conjunction with the admins.
Edit: that's @kersploosh@sh.itjust.works in case the one here is someone else.
That's me! Unfortunately, I don't have any clever solutions to active spamming other than responsive moderation, and better mod tools whenever they become available.
I was notifying instance admins of suspicious user totals that looked like swarms of auto-created bot accounts. Last time I checked, half a dozen admins that I contacted have deleted about 250,000 suspicious dormant accounts. It's not a solution to the problem, but it's something.
Hopefully several instance owners collaborate on a shared blocklist that will help combat this kind of spam and implement that back into their instances.
Lemmy at least does have a slur filter in place to block certain words that could be expanded to block spam like this. I don't know if kbin has something like that or not.
We have a bigger problem and it's popularity. Some instances will want to become as big as possible, for resell value.
So they will be encouraged to let the maximum of people registering a new account, including bots and spammers. Because they make the numbers and they start the snowball effect.
Didn't you all looked a the most populated instances/magazine when you registered magz, and you didn't care about the mags with zero activity? Well, you are encouraging the process in a way.
People will be reluctant to defederate or to ban popular magazines from other subs. So the float of spammers is unlikely to stop, because the person who makes the decision, the admin of the instance, will welcome them. And you won't ban the instance or the mag.
The emails revealed that Zuckerberg wanted to buy Instagram as it was becoming a threat to Facebook.
"Facebook, by its own admission saw Instagram as a threat that could potentially siphon business away from Facebook," Nadler said during the hearing on Wednesday.
"So rather than compete with it, Facebook bought it. This is exactly the type of anti-competitive acquisition the antitrust laws were designed to prevent," Nadler added.
Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, a shocking sum at that time for a company with 13 employees,
Facebook bought the adoption, they bought the users.
Well I can see one thing that kinda belies your point of view at present. Stability. Some people have presciently worried that their instance can implode, taking all content a user has made with it. Larger instances that are more stable, that have more backup infrastructure and ongoing commitment to operations, could out-compete smaller instances. Why this might arise, could be a historical accident of successful crowdfunding campaigns or something. I'm not sure how someone might do a better job of securing more server resources than others. Obviously a deep pocketed corporation who wants to influence the Fediverse, could do that.
But those are unrelated. We're talking about admins not acting in the best interest of the users so they can pump up numbers and sell their instances. You're talking about related concepts, but different motivations and intentions.
So none of that applies to fedi then. Can’t buy up users because we’re federated and can’t buy up competition, because we’re a just fart in Sahara in comparison, both in numbers of people and in revenue dollars
And since there’s no privacy here he can datamine the shit out of content already
Buying one instance doesn't change anything though. Instagram was the whole kit and caboodle. It made a difference. Buying one instance, even a large won't doesn't give the same leverage. Plus, it doesn't destroy competition or anything. It's not equivalent.
And thinking any single instance can sway the entire fediverse, whether they're "leaders" or not is naive. You'd need to buy the top 100 instances at once to force any actual change in the fediverse and those top 100 were more than likely formed to avoid consolidation like that. You're worried about something that is so insanely difficult to happen and would have such a low ROI compared to Instagram and acquisitions like it. It's literally being shown that it's cheaper for a corporation to create its own. That's what Threads is.
You miss-represent the fediverse. Users aren't locked in. If someone buys one instance and you don't like it, you move. You still have all the same access, all the same content. An instance is only an access point, in many ways it is like an ISP, and people jump service providers all the time.
You miss-represent the fediverse. Users aren't locked in. If someone buys one instance and you don't like it, you move.
Maybe you will but people in their majority won't do that. It's too much operations. Also they might not even be aware of the transfer. Plus if an instance offers good services there might be a technological price to pay for leaving, like leaving instagram. All instances are not equal, specially if there are more interfaces in preparation.
What services can they offer that aren't elsewhere? If it's unique, it won't actually be that effective. It can only be scoped to the instance.
Instagram isn't a comparison because it works entirely differently. By even saying "like Instagram" belies a lack of understanding of the topic.
It's true all instances are not equal. But your extension theory is not very strong. Nor is your instance-for-sale concept. They gain nothing from buying an instance. Users don't matter. They're just as reachable as another federated instance.
The admin was trying to get people to understand how federation works though. Most of my interactions are on other instances. That you're even discussing another instance is the admin's whole point of how your perspective is outdated. You don't need to join populated instances. You could literally setup your own and still access other people. You can actually reach more people from an unknown instance than very large ones. Many instances ban large ones due to large ones having less moderation. If you wanted to be real insidious, a corp could create its own instance and just spread posts/upvotes/etc elsewhere on other instances. As long as they don't push too hard, it would go unnoticed.
You're entirely misunderstanding the lemmy.ml admin. Sure people might flock to large instances out of instinct, but it's misguided. The admin was trying to show that user count isn't the metric you want to look at for an instance.
On the surface, you are correct. Think a little more insidiously and you'll start to see where the value comes in.
Let's say a person with ties to the Coca Cola corporation buys a popular instance. They are in control of that instance including where instance wide rules get enforced or not. It would be unwise to openly spout pro-Coca Cola messages and ban dissenters, so they'll be sneakier about it.
They'll create bot instances that create, upvote and boost posts and downvote dissenters, not enough to stick out, but enough to manipulate the feed algorithms early in the posts lifetime. And occasionally upvote and downvote some random posts to add noise to the user history. Otherwise, they let the instance run as it always has.
There will be accusations, but because it won't be provable or actionable outside of defederation or the banning of individual accounts. And other instances will hesitate to do the former because these accusations are not proven and the instance is still putting out content that their users are interacting with.
If the compromised instance admin needs to put out a fig leaf or two, they can ban the bot accounts and silently create more later.
You can, but owning the instance removes a lot of complications and people who can interfere. Who's gonna remove your bots from the instance once reported? You?
Owning the instance means you set the rules, both written and unwritten, and you're the one who can selectively enforce them.
You may still need to play politics with other instances but that's nothing a policy of plausible deniability wont see you through
If you're doing it enough that others interfere? You're going to lose all value in your instance as users leave and go elsewhere. You just wasted money on something you could have accomplished for a lot less, (and at least when that fails, you can do it again elsewhere).
You're better off just creating your own instance and posting elsewhere and changing your domain when defederated too much. Much cheaper, more effective, and much more reach.
Edit: I'm really disliking that all these conspiracy theories are forcing me to think of much less expensive ways for corporations to exploit the fediverse. That it hasn't happened is likely a sign the fediverse just isn't a big enough target as a whole or simply that they'd have no way to track the effectiveness.
I think the person you replied to is still stuck in the mindset of a siloed product, like reddit. Federation across instances means that there's little commercial value in any specific instance, in my view. If any specific instance was sold, and an attempt to monetize arose, I suspect people would simply abandon it for a new instance.
As an aside, lemmy/kbin need to implement a way to export/import follow lists.
Other people's posts / content. What about the user's own content? Sure plenty of people don't care, but there is a working set of people who do produce content online, who care about the visibility and longevity of their output.
Your closing suggestion doesn't actually affect the process. Admins still run the joint. The admin just needs to care. Admins can even make it invite only if they wanted. Do you have any source for this marketplace of instances?
So what will you do about an instance called "rofl.lol", which is huge, which has a lot of fans locally who want to keep interacting with it and which also allows spammers? Will you keep federating or will you defederate it?
If you don't defederate this will become and endless whack-a-mole of bans with a drop of quality.
Do you have any source for this marketplace of instances?
Do kbin and lemmy allow you to report accounts to the instance admins? I’m still used to Mastodon, where you report spam to the instance admins and they boot the accounts. That wold solve the problem at the source rather than make magazine/community mods have to play whack-a-mole.
How? I feel like it might be too easy for such accounts to be created. And they already pollute the fediverse before their accounts get banned. I think this will be more common until we have more proactive measures.
Mutli-Accounting/Creating mass-accounts for spam-reasons has been super easy on all platforms so far. What do you reckon "more proactive measures" to be?
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