this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There's no way the majority of comments in the near future won't just be LLMs.
I think it would make sense to channel all bots/propaganda into some concentrated channels. Something like https://lemmygrad.ml/u/yogthos where you can just block all propaganda by blocking one account.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn't even aware of the problem
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through hoops because that knowledge/experience makes it easier for them, they understand it's worthwhile or because it's fun. If software can be made easier for non-techy people and there's no downsides then of course that aught to be done.
Yeah that was kinda my point
Ok, now tell the linux people this.
10th largest instance being like 10k users... we're talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
There isn't a solution. People don't want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that's sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it's mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It's what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they're a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn't a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It's better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there's a social media not-for-profit that's trusted to manage identity, that people don't mind contributing costs to. But that's a huge undertaking. One day hopefully...
We have a human vetted application process too and that's why there's rarely any bots or spam accounts originating from our instance. I imagine it's a similar situation for programming.dev. It's just not worth the tradeoff to have completely open signups imo. The last thing lemmy needs is a massive influx of Meta users from threads, facebook or instagram, or from shitter. Slow, organic growth is completely fine when you don't have shareholders and investors to answer to.
Yep, completely agree.
The bar is not particularly high with lemmy and that is a focused community.
People aren't (generally) being made aware of the injustice on the other side of the planet while they are asking a question about C#.
Yeah but people ARE (generally) being made aware about Linux while they are asking a question about the injustice on the other side of the planet. You're welcome Lemmy!
/s, also I do not officially represent the instance in any capacity, lol
It's how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
I dunno man. Discord has thousands of closed servers that are doing great.
If we're talking about breaking tech oligarchs hold on social media, no closed server anywhere comes close as a replacement to meta or Twitter.
If you could vet members in any meaningful way, they'd be doing it already.
Most instances are open wide to the public.
A few have registration requirements, but it’s usually something banal like “say I agree in Spanish to prove your Spanish enough for this instance” etc.
This is a choice any instance can make if they want, none are but that doesn’t mean they can’t or it doesn’t work.
Isn't that basically the same result though...
Problem with tech oligarchy is it just takes one person to get corrupted and then he blocks out all opinion that attacks his goals.
So the solution is federation, free speech instances that everyone can say whatever they want no matter how unpopular.
How do we counteract the bots...
Well we need the instances to verify who gets in, and make sure the members aren't bots or saying unpopular things. These instances will need to be big, and well funded.
How do we counter these instance owners getting bought out, corrupted (repeat loop).
Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
I wish this was the case but the average user is uninformed and can’t be bothered leaving.
Otherwise the bigger service would be lemmy, not reddit.
Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
We could ask for anonymous digital certificates. It works this way.
Many countries already emit digital certificates for it's citizens. Only one certificate by id. Then anonymous certificates could be made. The anonymous certificate contains enough information to be verificable as valid but not enough to identify the user. Websites could ask for an anonymous certificate for register/login. With the certificate they would validate that it's an human being while keeping that human being anonymous. The only leaked data would probably be the country of origin as these certificates tend to be authentificated by a national AC.
The only problem I see in this is international adoption outside fully developed countries: many countries not being able to provide this for their citizens, having lower security standards so fraudulent certificates could be made, or a big enough poor population that would gladly sell their certificate for bot farms.
I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:
Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)
Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.
Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.
A bot can do that and do it at scale.
I think we are going to need to reconceptualize the Internet and why we are on here at all.
It already is practically impossible to stop bots and I'm a very short time it'll be completely impossible.
I think I communicated part of this badly. My intent was to address “what is this speech?” classification, to make moderation scale better. I might have misunderstood you but I think you’re talking about a “who is speaking?” problem. That would be solved by something different.
What? I post a lot, but the majority?
...oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
A simple thing that may help a lot is for all new accounts to be flagged as bots, requiring opt out of the status for normal users. It's a small thing, but any barrier is one more step a bot farm has to overcome.
we have to use trust from real life. it's the only thing that centralized entities can't fake