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

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.

We just defederate.

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.

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

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

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.

There's nothing stopping them from hosting a massive instance. But people aren't forced to move there to interact with them.

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

They are already training on the fediverse. If something is on the public web, you can assume it's in some training data somewhere

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.

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!

They already tried it. It's called Threads. It exists. People use it. And other instances have the choice to simply not federate with them.

To me (as unpopular as this sounds) that's the beautiful thing about FOSS and about Federation in particular. No one is stopping anyone from creating their own instance. Even Corporations.

It's the ultimate expression of "Anyone can do what they want, say what they want, believe what they want...but no one else is in any way obligated to listen to them/federate with them"

I know of companies that host small mastodon instances for their staff to communicate back and forth. I know of similar setups with lemmy instances. Anyone can use the technology for anything they wish to.

Threads is trying to become that. We have a list of instances blocking Threads here: https://fedipact.veganism.social/

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.

You can defederate from the corporate servers.

We would find out. We would defederate them

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.

Like others pointed out defederation, but to add the important bit for normies (don't mean derogatory at all) is that it is not meant to be a less complicated or more efficient experience, it is meant to have more (or actual) freedom and democracy.

Much like with gov politics, you have to be active to some degree or a few people can control everything.

So yes, when defederation needs to happen or communities moved (for much of that additional tools will streamline the processes in the future I'm sure), it's a bit messy, but it doesn't rob you or feed the megacorps pushing the society into more inequality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing

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.

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

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.

Federation, no?

Too many small instances that will block and/or break away. People will then leave the corporate ones and join the smaller ones who will have joined up with each other.

Big Business is what has killed and is killing places like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and others. Big Business FAILS to interact with people in conversations outside what effected them. They keep saying that they have a place on these sites and that we should follow them, but the odds of them following back is not that great, and the odds of them having a conversation about other things is even slimmer.

Big Business pretends to be apart of the "in crowd", but fails on how to really be apart of it. On the dead bird, I followed very few businesses, celebrities and influencers, as I noticed most were just about them, and not conversing with those with few followers. I also find that with them, they want to be able to boost about the number of followers and collect checks from big business, the platform and others. Ever watch an IRL streamer on Twitch, Kick or some other platform? For me, I find most of them to be boring and it appears that they are way to lazy to get a job, as they simply want to get people to give them money for them doing nothing.

What I have found interesting is how many people and businesses have gone running back to the dead bird after seeing how few followers they have gotten on decentralized platforms. I think that they find it hard to believe that they are not as important as they think that they are.

I think that businesses learned when watching other businesses drop out of having their own server when they set up instances with Mastodon and very few came. They also saw that they couldn't "ad" us to death like they could on Twitter. They have made a few small inroads onto other centralized platforms, as the owners are using that money to keep going, but the Fediverse as a whole is to complicated to try and hijack.