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?
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.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
???
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 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com community by ripping it out from any relevant context, go ahead I guess?
I didn’t say you were power tripping.
I was mentioning that community as a way to handle power tripping mods.
It also works, !lotrmemes@midwest.social is being replaced by !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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
Oh okay! I’m sorry about the misunderstanding.
No worries!
Oh wow you are fast - I just commented with the identical example. :-)
Nice comment!
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 !lotrmemes@midwest.social now has an alternative !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com community).
“Power tripping mods” definitionally cannot exist on the fediverse where anyone can create an instance or community. Even on Reddit, 99% of the time someone said a mod was “power tripping” it was just a right winger upset that the mod removed their disruptive nonsense.
The purpose of communities like the one you linked to is to shame mods into employing a passive, generic bare-minimum style of moderation, when we should be encouraging the opposite if we want diversity in the fediverse.
Power tripping mods can exist anywhere there are mods, even here. The rest of your point stands though.
It’s theirs. They can do whatever they want. Any limits their power within the instance/community is purely voluntary on the part of the owner.
Instance = admin, community = mod, but either can still power trip within the confines of their little worlds.
Three examples from that community, where other people can discuss the moderation, and see whether it’s power tripping or not.
Right wingers aren’t that numberous of Lemmy, but when this happens it gets quickly disqualified by the people commenting
Enjoy your empty community nobody cares about because people post on the one where most of the people are, where the power tripping mod is operating
Mods and admins on the Fediverse are not democratically elected, they have complete control. Accusing one of “power tripping”, in their own community, on the instance they presumably pay for, is not a rational accusation, since they definitionally cannot exist in a state of less power. What that community is trying to do is use the threat of public shaming to influence behavior. It’s how you get weak moderation and generic communities where bad actors can thrive. A community dedicated to “Stopping bad mods” sounds good on the surface, but it’s an argument made in bad faith.
The first sentence you wrote is either misleading or incorrect, and I think it’s important to reexamine. Each administrator has control over the instance they run, but they don’t have control over the Fediverse itself, and because it’s so easy for people to move to other instances, they have little control over other users.
Mods don’t pay for the instance, they aren’t in charge of any of it.
Some admins have strong policies against getting involved into moderation of communities, leaving potential power tripping mods unchecked.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I too think that regional instances would be ideal for a “backbone” of the social web. But at the same time, I feel that interest-based connection is a truly unique strength of the internet and it would be a sad thing to lose to the slop.
Ultimately, I think that more, smaller instances is likely the best “ultimate” defense against slop since there is no incentive for them to scale beyond their needs. But every instance admin is technically responsible for the content on all federated instances. Which can get overwhelming!
I mean, regional instances don’t have to stop folks from engaging primarily with interest based communities.
Some regions will dominate certain interests for example - here in Tucson we’re consider one of the Amateur Astronomy capitals of the world. If mander.xyz were to disappear tomorrow, Tucson would make a good home for all of the fediverse’s astronomy needs even though its a region based instance.
Further, there’s nothing that states an interest-based instance needs any registration. One could imagine a world where local instances have all the users and identities, and the interest based instances simply provide communities to the larger fediverse with no users of their own.
But yeah, it’s definitely a paradigm shift that makes interest based communities a bit more difficult to find.
Yes, I’ve had this same thought and I think it’s a great model! If it comes to pass or not remains to be seen. But the concept is good!