With previous Rexit's like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.

What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?

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[–] HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Human verification? As in "give us your photo" or something?

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean, fundamentally, yeah.

But we live in a corporate controlled, corrupt, world and now of these larger companies can be trusted with this process.

Some smaller communities and platforms DO this right sometimes, as they build in house processu that respect privacy. But governments world wide are making this impossible through increasingly strict compliance requirements that actually increase data privacy risks and funnel these needs to 3rd party services who just lie about what they do with the data.

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I'm not kidding when I say this is a REAL BIG PROBLEM.

bot based traffic and astroturfing will supplement and replace human communication on platforms like Lemmy. Driving the narrative and how we engage to the whims of a few rich people. Bots are relatively cheap, and easy to deploy at scale across many platforms.

There will be no open corner of the internet safe from manipulation and forced division. More people will be forced into walled gardens from corps that implement human verification, as they are the only ones with the resources to do something (While also being the source of the problem, see how that works?)

How do you carve out spaces that are protected from that? Well, you need to determine who's a bot, and who's and actual person.

But we can't do that, so the alternative is we are ran over by bots and astroturfing till we're at each other's throats like good culture war puppets.

The future is bleak....

[–] HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Answer, in my opinion, is local communities.

Perhaps it's a bit of nationalist of me, but I think we are flooded daily with unnecessary information about what happens in other countries. In my personal opinion a random person from, say, Berlin or Paris shouldn't be bombarded daily with news about another school shooting in backwater american town. Nor should they know what happens in politics of each other nations.

A community of my town would be useless for bots, especially if it banned all politics and ads from beyond my town. Elections of president? No dice, the only elections we care about is our mayor.

I do not live in USA. I shouldn't know about Trump as much as I do, I shouldn't be talking daily to americans. What relationships could I form with them? We will never go together to restaurant, bar, bowling alley etc. But place where my countrymen, and americans, and french, and germans etc. are herded together is the best place for bots.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 hours ago

A local community also makes it much easier to check humanity vs botness. Just summon the members to an open meeting at the local cat café and exchange GPG keys or something, like in the good ol' days.