this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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The Fediverse is a great system for preventing bad actors from disrupting "real" human-human conversations, because all of the mods, developers and admins are all working out of a desire to connect people (as opposed to "trust and safety" teams more concerned about user retention).

Right now it seems that the Fediverses main protection is that it just isn't a juicy enough target for wide scale spam and bad faith agenda pushers.

But assuming the Fediverse does grow to a significant scale, what (current or future) mechanisms are/could be in place to fend off a flood of AI slop that is hard to distinguish from human? Even the most committed instance admins can only do so much.

For example, I have a feeling all "good" instances in the near future will eventually have to turn on registration applications and only federate with other instances that do the same. But it's not crazy to imagine that GPT could soon outmaneuver most registration questions which means registrations will only slow the growth of the problem but not manage it long-term.

Any thoughts on this topic?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (19 children)

Hi there! Admin of Tucson.social here.

I think that the only way the fediverse can honestly handle this is through local/regional nodes not interest based global nodes.

Ideally this would manifest as some sort of non-profit entity that would work with municipalities to create community owned spaces that have paid moderation.

So then comes the problem of folks not agreeing with a local nodes moderation staff - but that's also WHY it should be local. It's much easier to petition and organize against someone who exists in your town than some guy across the globe who happens to own a large fediverse node.

This model just doesn't work (IMO) if nodes can't be accountable to a local community. If you don't like how Mastodon, or lemmy.world are moderated you have zero recourse. For Tucson.social - citizens of Tucson can appeal to me directly, and because they are my fellow citizens I take them FAR more seriously.

Only then will people be trusting enough to allow for the key element to protecting against AI Slop. Human Indemnification Systems. Right now, if you wanted to ask the community of lemmy.world to provide proof they are human, you'd wind up with an exodus. There's just no trust for something like that and it would be hard to acquire enough trust.

With a local node, that conversation is still difficult, but we can do things that just don't scale with global nodes. Things like validating a person by meeting them to mark them as "indemnified" on a platform, or utilizing local political parties to validate if a given person is "real" or not using voter rolls.

But yeah, this is a bit rambly, but I'll conclude that this is a problem that exists at the intersection between trust and scale and that I believe that local nodes are the only real solution that can handle both.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (15 children)

lemmy.world are moderated you have zero recourse

[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

???

I don't particularly have any issues with them.

But if a user did, they don't have much recourse. I'm talking about that as a structural aspect. Not a moral one.

But sure if you just want to claim this puts me in the [email protected] community by ripping it out from any relevant context, go ahead I guess?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I didn't say you were power tripping.

I was mentioning that community as a way to handle power tripping mods.

It also works, [email protected] is being replaced by [email protected] after the admin started power tripping.

So it's not just moral, it also has a real impact by allowing users to organize and switch communities

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oh okay! I'm sorry about the misunderstanding.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oh wow you are fast - I just commented with the identical example. :-)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Fwiw, Blaze I'm sure was saying that the recourse could be to post the infraction there, so that people become aware of a "power tripping bastard", i.e. the lemmy.world mod hypothetical example mentioned earlier.

Multiple times communities have been shifted from one instance to another due to precisely this effect. A recent example is how [email protected] now has an alternative [email protected] to help people get out from under the heel of the power tripping admin of that particular instance (described in a recent post in the [email protected] community).

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