Yeah, but in federated social media you can just pack up and set up a new instance.
You won't ever need to leave the whole thing behind to disconnect from corporate BS.
My concerns the product advertisers attempting to sneak in, bragging or something. It felt rampant on Reddit, so it’s probably left me wary. 😣
And if that happens, you can bet your ass there will one day be instance-wide ad-block that auto-blocks users/instances known for posting ads.
If that becomes a thing, there will be instances that explicitly filter it out.
The problem is its hard to tell what's an ad and what's not. Sometimes people ARE just enthusiastic about a product they found and want to share it.
It's easier when it's a large company like Burger King or something; like most people won't just suddenly start raving about this great new burger place they found called Burger King. It's different for more obscure companies. It could be actual Lemmy users who are just passionate or it could be company employees trying to sneak advertisements into site discussions.
I don't think there's any AI or other tools that could distinguish the two.
That's exactly right, NorSteve_
That's why I like to start my day with a Whopper and side of onion rings from my favourite local burger joint, Burger King. It supports the community and I get a dank feed while I scroll through Lemmy's dank memes.
Don’t forget to try the new Whopper melt. Add bacon for $.50 more, or make it spicy with another $1.00. Can’t fight climate change on an empty stomach.
I am one of these people, am a dope smoker and recently got into related Lemmy communities. There's a lot of equipment that you dont hear about until through word of mouth so when I find something I LOVE through word of mouth like the arizer air max or brilliant cut grinder I do my part to scream their praises from the heavens so other smokers have a chance to hear about them.
Oh nice, what communities would you recommend? I'm already in !trees@sh.itjust.works, !microgrowery@lemmy.ml, !cannabiscultivation@slrpnk.net, !high_videos@sh.itjust.works, !stoner_rock@sh.itjust.works
!vaporents@lemmy.beyondcombustion.net is an excellent community you may want to check into :) !trees@lemmy.world is the trees community I frequent, will have to check out the shitjustworks one
Double edge sword. "This guy is shilling" reports go rampant .
Hopefully, the Reddit bot trackers peeps will move to lemmy, and lend us their wisdom.
I learnt so many ways realise a poster or commenter was a bit from those peeps. Amazing MVPs!
And folks like kitboga taught me that spammers/scammers generally stick to a script.
It's gonna be an arms race! Hopefully we win!
Yo I also worry about advertisers attempting to target me with localised advertisements, which is why I use Borg VPN! Nice try, advertisers, but those "hot milfs" are nowhere near me, ha!
/parody
That's why I started my own instance, I got the freedom to pick and choose what instances I allow, so if any corporation decides to join the fediverse I don't have to wait for the admin to defedederate.
Just make sure if you're using it as a personal instance to make it so no one but the admin can make communities and restrict your sign ups so your instance can't get taken over by nutjobs.
Interesting! Is there a risk of ballooning costs from legitimate bandwidth costs? Do you set some arbitrary limits on how much traffic you'll support before you turn off the tap?
Yeah I could see myself eventually joining a splinter of the fediverse that is even more rabidly anti-corporate than we are right now. Like constantly blocking shills and instances that refuse to do their own aggressive pruning.
I wouldn't mind some of the "normies" joining. I'm a programmer too, and while the programmer/Linux jokes get a little bit of a chuckle out of me I wouldn't mind some other stuff.
I really hope it works out as smoothly as this, it feels like advertising sneaks it’s way in somehow though. 😣
It's not and I'm Lovin' It. The Fediverse I mean. Want to defederate from corporate ads? Just Do It. Have It Your Way and Make Every Second Count.
Really, you just need to Think Different.
I’m more worried about the advertisers sneaking in through “bragging” about products, like Reddit saw. 😣
It's a form of guerrilla advertising where they play on FOMO and try to make people jealous of someone who is "loving" the product. It's one of the harder forms of shilling to detect because it can sound just like a regular person who actually does enjoy a specific product.
I’ll admiit, bragging wasn’t the right word, but I meant all the PR teams the enshittify social media like fleas, by pretending to be a run of the mill user, attempting to build hype.
Oh I get what you mean.
Yeah I tried to google what a good free VPN was and all the Reddit posts were OBVIOUS plants by VPNs that wanted you to pay for them.
I found a free one eventually but Reddit was no help.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. I haven't seen a pop up or a banner ad; but I've seen plenty of ads in the form of a creator trying to sell their creation and other shill stuff. Not nearly as often as on Reddit, but it's not something you can escape from on social media.
I’m fine with that. I just don’t want to be reminded that hellofresh exists every five minutes.
Corporations are coming, it's inevitable, but at least this time we won't have to deplatform ourselves to have a sensible discussion.
Someone will try and justify corporate investments. And once they get in, they will infest. They ALWAYS play the long game.
I agree that they will deliberately try to infiltrate, but corporations are notorious for never playing the long game.
That is why lemmy is decentralized, no one can buy every single instance. and even when a corporation buys the codebase of lemmy, another person can come in and create their own platform that is still compatible
Yeah there is, governments too. It's not super widespread but they do have a presence.
Due to how federation and anti-viral Mastodon is though, they can't hijack trends and stuff so a lot will most likely never come.
I felt kinda bad for the people who were here when I joined two months ago. They had their own little community which would get quickly overrun by ex redditors. I wasn't sure if I was a refugee or a colonizer.
If those people want their own isolated communities, those exist elsewhere. You join the fediverse because you expect it to grow and network.
I feel like it's like discovering a hidden place at a lake that's really beautiful. You can't really claim it as exclusively your's but would still very much prefer it if no one else went there, as selfish as that might be
To be fair they could create a server and just not Federate with anyone? Or federate selectively?
This is what beehaw did, it ruffled some feathers but imo they're probably better for it, considering the goals of the instance.
Yeah, I actually like this concept. The fediverse has the power to be much larger, but it doesn't have to be for any group that wants to keep things small.
I also kind of like how the fediverse has space for just the worst, most bigoted folks to fuck around and find out here. If they run away to rumble or truth social or whatever alternative they're trying this week, they can stay in their little bubbles and pretend they're the real popular voices, at least until it inevitably implodes.
In the fediverse, they can see the federation graphs, they can read the defederation announcements, and they can start to see exactly where they stand in popular opinion. I think that's got to have an effect on them long term. The paid shills can try to deny reality from their followers, but it's harder.
It’s certainly starting to show that some people with views who wasn’t here before are starting to arrive. Like people openly trolling, making racist and confrontational comments. Feels pretty bad, it was such a nice haven here.
Control measures are inevitable, like account length requirements, etc. I don't see any way around that to have a usable usergenerated site. A lot of the previous reddit alternatives were full of racism because of who reddit pissed off on the site, but people like that need an audience and they don't generate good content. The nerds who do always have to deal with trolls.
I hope it will be manageable. Heavy moderation is very time- and energy consuming and the people behind the instances today are already under big pressure to keep things in order.
Yup. Maybe sharing ban lists between some instances might help, along with some system of ensuring one person can't easily create many accounts at once. Otherwise they can just create new ones easily. There needs to be a hurdle when creating many accounts at once.
(Recording IP used during creation, maybe? Then you could see other accounts created at a similar time using that IP and take a look at those too)
The gatekeeping is especially ironic (or maybe just hypocritical) because they didn't use this meme template properly, lol. You know, like a "normie".
I wish there was a word for normie in English that isn't so derogative. Some other countries have a word for "normie" and it more or less means the same thing, but without the negative connotation. Simply just means people that exist outside of a more niche community; the status quo or your average commoner. Normie, especially on reddit is more synonymous to calling someone an incel.
I guess I do use layman when saying "in layman's terms" lol. But layman also seems so formal and antique to use. I guess normie just rolls off the tongue better.
Great. Now I'm worried I'm a normie and not the "Manifest Destiny" nerd I have been trying to be.
/s
Seriously though, from the comments, it's seems like the corporate rats gaining ground in places that are federated is going to be a lot harder, and more user resilient.
I read a comment earlier somewhere that at least they hadn’t seen anyone use /s yet.
....yet.
As soon as a space is big and diverse enough that you stop recognising usernames or even instances, you've got to signal intent. It's unavoidable. Only alternative is to give shelter to shitheads, who say the same things, but mean them.
controversial opinion; I think lots of companies should host lemmy instances for their own support forums.
I think that news organisations should create their own distribution instances. The BBC has started to set up their own Mastodon server. I would definitely prefer to be able to create my own news feed, direct from source, and selected for greater criteria than how many rage clicks a headline is likely to garner.
Not controversial at all.
There are considerations.
Corporate instances affecting public opinion.
Corporate opinion silencing/moderating public opinion.
All that, and user moderation as well.
A company may not like legitimate dissenters, but it might be in the public interest...
Unmoderated, it might turn into a cesspool.
So, who moderates it? AI/AutoMod? And how? What algo? Does that retroactively apply on updates?
This happens on actual company forums. Yes.
So, we need 2 lemmy communities per company? Their one, and a public one? What if the public one is being unfair? Who knows about that?
It's tough!
Different version:
Only nerds with the worst opinions migrate
Only nerds with the worst opinions migrate
One time we thought that Google was a cool startup head on against corporate giant Microsoft 😔
Don't kid yourself. Its us that fuck it all up. We love getting fleeced by the simplest of content creators. We will walk in every single thing we hate about other sites into this site just because someone entertains us.
Soon as they got our attention, they'll monetize our it and everything will go to shit.
Its forbidden to talk shit about content creators, they make content and content is king.
On the internet, Creative people are the guys in suits. They'll do whatever they can to turn your every waking minute into a 24/7 commercial
Anything that gains too much steam and mainstream attention is ripe for corporate takeover/infiltration. Federation should hopefully keep them at bay for a while.
But because it's federated, we can secede at anytime. It's a fool proof system like the united states.
Is there a FOSS license that can prohibit code being used for profit over a certain amount?
No, but there are copyleft licenses that require anyone using a fork of some open-source project for for-profit purposes to subsequently open-source any changes they make.
Lemmy is AGPL v3.0. From what I understand, that means anyone running Lemmy (or a fork of Lemmy) needs to make their source code public, even if their code changes are strictly to support their own network infrastructure.
it really doesn't matter though, as a corporation only needs to implement an interface to Lemmy via ActivityPub protocols; in other words it they could write a completely closed-source backend to use for profit and as long as it can poop out the correct data structures over ActivityPub to allow Lemmy instances to understand it, it will work.
This already happens as we can see and subscribe to kbin magazines, and Mastodon users can be @'d and IIRC can reply to comments via Hoot (or whatever they call it). Kinda wild, but it also leaves the door open to literally whoever.
I think the real interesting question is will a large corporate player be able to maintain a captive userbase? None of the doomsday scenarios play out in their favor unless they can capture users and communities - because then the usefulness of the whole thing rides on their server being available. At that point it's reddit with more steps - they can do what they want.
No, that's against the ideology of freedom. What you can do is dual license with a FOSS and a commercial license.
So what happens to both projects that buy into foss to commercial? Are they 2 single licenses then?
I get the different licenses apache Gnu, copy left, copy right. I'm just not intricately familiar with them. Is there one that exists that could do both?
Climate change, the equalizer. Can’t have markets without resources. Laughing and crying at the same time.
