this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.

  1. Bots can disrupt smaller instances:

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What's stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It's safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.

  1. Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:

Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all instances to flood major them with ads. With generative content, it is so much easier to make a seemingly casual post about a product and mask it as an advertisement.

I've seen previous posts about people wanting to come because of their opinion about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.

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[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Its sad that we are so tiny but its also a blessing that we have this corner of the internet to ourselves

[–] Aux@feddit.uk 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Well, nothing is sad on its own, it all depends on the priorities of people behind. If the priority is to keep Fediverse small and under the radar, then everything is going great.

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

You're right. I was feeling sad because I was hoping more people would share the values that would lead them to pick a place like this over facebook. I know this place will win in the end I just fear the damage that will be done before global communication is freed from the grips of companies.

[–] Aux@feddit.uk 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Well, you can't do anything meaningful at large scale without a company. Every large and popular open source project has a company behind and there are legal reasons behind it. If the Fediverse becomes big enough, there will be a point when a company will be required for it to function.

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 1 points 41 minutes ago (1 children)

I disagree. You don't need a company but do do need a form of governance behind a la4ge project. There are plenty of Foss projects that grew large and became a core block of a wide ecosystem without having a company be the sole backer. Off the top of my head http and oauth

[–] Aux@feddit.uk 1 points 23 minutes ago

You need a company for legal protection. There are too many idiots in this world who will try their best to sue you for no reason. The bigger you grow, the higher the risk. That's why we have the Mozilla Corp and Linux Foundation: a company will pay a fine in the worst case scenario, but a private person behind the project is looking at a jail time.