I do fear that as federation grows, then so too will potentially the same threats that happen on centralised social media. The fediverse is going to have a lot of vulnerable servers who won’t moderate or detect trolls & bots and over time the issue could become extremely onerous.
Comment on BBC: Extending our Mastodon social media trial
helenslunch@feddit.nl 9 months ago
For some equivalent posts we’ve seen significantly larger engagement numbers for Mastodon compared to X/Twitter, particularly given the relative sizes of different platforms.
So you get significantly larger engagement numbers and spend less time moderating. What’s left to ponder, amigo?
arc@lemm.ee 9 months ago
helenslunch@feddit.nl 9 months ago
No doubt. However that was considered during it’s inception and there are measures to mitigate that.
However, of you look at the stats, federation is not growing. Quite the opposite really.
arc@lemm.ee 9 months ago
If a server were an obvious conduit for disinfo then other servers could defederate from it. But if it was different accounts on different servers mixed in with authentic users then it’s almost impossible to remove. What tools does mastodon / lemmy even provide to spot inauthentic behaviour? And because we’re talking different servers run in different ways there is no clear picture from above that can be formed in the same way that a centralized social media platform might have - identifying suspicious clusters of nodes or traffic.
As for federation’s future we’ll wait and see. Both bluesky and threads are talking of providing federation protocols - threads using activitypub and bluesky it’s own API. As for Mastodon & Lemmy I see a lot of positive interest in these things. The fact we’re commenting on Lemmy instead of Reddit says a lot.
BigDiction@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Scale. It’s a better quality audience but executives like BIG NUMBERS to make the juice worth the squeeze.
I think the investment supporting is worth it in the long run! Traditional social is basically a shitty rev share to reach a larger audience.