Ask Lemmy

Tech enthusiasts are usually the early adopters. They’re okay with a bit of fiddling to get stuff working.

Normies are not. That’s where you’ll see some conflict.

"Success" by which I mean a massive influx of millions of users: IMO it's kind of in a sweet spot because it's not as easy to use as most social media, so a lot of the dumber people just don't come here because they can't figure it out (for example, they think there's nothing here because they don't understand the filter/how instances work).

If things are made too easy, they'll start showing up in droves and they'll bring tons of reddit's bullshit over here. More bots, spammers, scammers, malicious hackers, and trolls pretty much everywhere and the mod tools on Lemmy aren't terribly advanced, which is one of the main forum platforms in the Fediverse.

we havent solved the 'new user' -> instance' problem

its hard to explain to people the concept that the server you login to is just the home base of an entire network. explaining the dance of instance interoperability immediately tunes out potential new users.

the fediverse isnt really open to newcomers.. they tend to land on the big ones like .world and then slowly warm up to the idea theyre communicating with many remote servers... if they stick around

Fedi was built on the same premise that makes all tech products fail:

The idea that people will behave themselves and act in good faith.

They won't, and they don't. And it only takes a handful of bad actors to ruin it for everyone else.

Mainstream popularity.

If lemmy becomes big enough to have a user base that is a substantial slice of the population as a whole, corpo will try to ruin it as it ruined the internet as a whole.

So far the attention has mostly been a couple of content bots from news sites, and big socials spinning up their own instances only to get defenerated immediately. Once more effort is seen as profitable, that's when there will be a real problem with bots, ads camouflaged as content, astroturfing, and everything else that follows.

Moderation of bad actors. Not just people who are assholes, or people who post spam, but I mean astroturfing and vote manipulation schemes that cross instances.

I've been followed around by a set of accounts who never post and never comment but downvote everything I comment. I have zero ways to report them directly. They were consistently downvoting a set of accounts including me and upvoting a different set of accounts. I DM'd 3 admins but the only attention I got was from a dedicated comm mod who could only ban them from a few comms and they talked to their admin on my behalf.

https://lemvotes.org/ paints a picture of a vote manipulation ring but all I could do was manually message people who couldn't be bothered. I couldn't care less they were downvoting me, I have nothing important to say, but the fake engagement around who they were boosting didn't sit right with me.

This sort of sums up my experience: https://lemmy.zip/comment/29353636 and it's corresponding https://lemvotes.org/comment/lemmy.zip/comment/29353636

Sharing audio clips. You can post photos and videos anywhere, there's always a button for those. Audio? Go make a separate account somewhere else.

Success.

With success come the bots, trolls, and buyouts. All the big platforms started as places people liked to be. The enshittification always came after the success.

ai bots

Spammers and other nefarious actors.

There's a lot of trust built into federation.

It's not ready to really replace what it's meant to replace.

I mean, people are told all of the time to make instances and make servers if the things they're not seeing aren't there. But there's a problem, they're only one person. It takes numerous people to make a community. The users we have on paper, would say that we have more than a capable amount to make these things possible.

But in practice and in activity, that's not what we're seeing. We can't estimate how long exactly things will pick up as we are nearing 4 years into the fediverse. But we just know that how long it's taking, we can expect that it'll be quite a time before the fediverse even sniffs a quarter of activity the big social networks have.

Dealing with the avalanche of bot accounts.
Seen around the mod chat that instances with signup approvals are getting slammed with marketing people vometing llm bots everywhere.

Normies. I want decentralized social media to grow but to do that it needs people who aren't self-selecting.

My nudes.

Spam and bots.

assuming if there is a exodus from reddit, the instances are not prepared for a large influx of people. cue the last big instance, there wasnt enough people maintaing the instance. its not likely going to happen since people will be scattered to different sites anyways,.

• there’s no way to know your admins aren’t compromised in some way
• there’s not much to defend against an influx of LLM user accounts
• eventually someone will post something or do something serious that gets the attention of law enforcement/intelligence agencies and they go after the entire federation instead of the problem users or servers
• identity verification laws

The legislation trying to mandate proof of identity from all users of all social media.

We'd need to diversify the locations of Fediverse servers so that there would be a place to easily migrate to if a server suddenly is forced to implement this demand – basically meaning it needs to be closed down.

LOL.

Users. As soon as there's enough MAUs to be worth manipulating, everyone will defederate, because we have not protection against this threat.

If an explosion of ai-based hacking bots causes servers to adopt a new tech for approving browsing based data requests, I wonder how quickly Lemmy can innovate into that system as well. As it stands the fediverse still hasn’t solved the problem of basically DDOSing a site when a post is made and all the instances call the same site for thumbnails and post text. I wonder if they’re prepared to follow any potential future changes in how those calls for data are even made to begin with, let along proliferating them amongst all instances.