MudMan

Agreed, for sure. If anything, decentralization makes those things harder, I’d say. And also agreed that there are benefits to decentralization along the lines you mention. Those two things can be true at the same time.

I think it’d be cool to figure out what the toolset to handle those issues is before they become a problem. Or, honestly, just because figure it out would be a meaningful challenge and may move the sorry state of social media in the right direction just in general. That said, there is a LOT of overcomplacent assumptions, at least in the userbase, regarding decentralization being a magic bullet. I think the development side is a lot less… I don’t want to say naive, but a lot more realistic about the challenges, in any case.

No, see, you’re assuming that this is a problem for one instance. Which makes sense because there’s nobody here and not much incentive to target people who are.

If you’re the size of a Twitter (and that’s a couple hundred million accounts) or a Facebook (about ten times that), then there are more than enough people to be targeted by more than enough bad actors to swamp EVERY instance with more spam sign-ins than Beehaw ever had, legitimate or not.

And you have nothing to stop bad actors from spinning up entire instances, which you then have to moderate individually, too.

You can’t defederate from every instance that gets hostile accounts because the logical thing if you’re a malicious actor is to automate signups to ALL available instances. Spam is spam is spam. You do it at scale. And you can’t shut down all signups on all instances if you want to provide the service at scale.

There is no systemic solution to malicious use. If there was, commercial social media would have deployed it to save money, at least when they were still holding to the pretense that they moderate things to meet regulations. Moderation is hard and expensive, and there are no meaningful federation-wide tools to manage it in place. I don’t even know if there can be. The idea that defederation and closing signups will be enough at scale is clearly not accurate. I don’t even think most of the big players in making federation apps would disagree with that. I think the hope is the tools will grow as the needs for them do. I’m not super sure of how well that will go, but I’m also not sure things will get big enough for that to matter at any point soon.

Yep. People around here love to attribute some magic powers to decentralization it definitely does not have. The assumption that crappy behavior is somehow localized to a specific instance is bizarre, nothing is keeping people from spamming accounts on instances with free signups. If anything, the decentralization makes it significantly harder to scale up moderation, on top of all the added costs of hosting volunteer social media servers.

That said, I’m not concerned at this point. There is nowhere near enough growth happening to make this be a problem for a long time. Masto worried about it legitimately for like twenty minutes back in some of the first few exodus incidents, before all the normies got alienated and landed on Bluesky.

Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, it feels all retro and kinda like 90s forums, but “what if it gets so popular it’s swamped with bad actors” is VERY low in my list of priorities. We have like two spammers and they’ve become local mascots. Mass malicious engagement is NOT the concern at the moment.

You can always do that manually when creating the post. I do think AI could enforce having a quick summary at a glance… if it was reliably accurate. But again, why do that and prevent traffic from going to the people who did all the work when you can just… you know, go read what the people who made all the work made.

Ultimately there’s a fundamental problem in an attention-driven economy directed at squishy-brained humans with biased, broken cognitive systems that can be easily exploited.

I’ll make a complementary argument below in a sec, but “enforcing driving traffic” seems like a feature, not a bug.

For how testy people get about crawling for copyrigted stuff for things like AI, everybody seems super chill about search engines and aggregators ripping off content at industrial scales with zero repercussions.

Ah, hey, everybody going “everybody else doesn’t get it, but I do”, we finally see an example of not getting it in the wild.

See, my problem with this is how everybody is silently appending “except for me” to this opinion.

You’re going to pretend we’re not on that timeline right now? I see your play, time traveller.

Not what he’s talking about. He’s still lying and whining, but not saying what you (or the headline) imply he’s saying.

He’s saying that the pre-existing tariffs on out of quota dairy products are “cheating US farmers”. Which is not true. The body of the article explains this correctly and in good detail, but the headline sucks and nobody ever reads past the headline because we all have brain rot as a species.

I wonder if a good Fedi alternative to Reddit would do something like force the link to be previewed in full or opened before getting to respond to the aggregation. Or maybe all social media was a mistake and none of it should exist, I don’t know.

And let me be clear, I’m not attacking you here, this is a sytemic issue. Every human is subject to these patterns. Blame our collective wetware.

If I’m reading this right this still required a manual clickthrough (seemingly forced through a fake video player) and running an executable, right? The description is simultaneously very detailed and fuzzy on the social engineering portion.

Analysis of the redirector chain determined the attack likely originated from illegal streaming websites where users can watch pirated videos. The streaming websites embedded malvertising redirectors within movie frames to generate pay-per-view or pay-per-click revenue from malvertising platforms. These redirectors subsequently routed traffic through one or two additional malicious redirectors, ultimately leading to another website, such as a malware or tech support scam website, which then redirected to GitHub.

Not to say you don’t want an adblocker for security reasons, but still, the implication in the reporting is “have an ad pop up, get infected”, when it was more “click on the “watch PopularseriesS02e04” prompt, fail multiple times due to it being an obvious scam, get prompted to download some files, install said files, get infected”.

It’s an awkward example to pick. Human genome research was so controversial someone made an award-winning dystopian sci-fi movie to criticise it.

We did collectively get Maya Hawke out of that deal, though.

Incidentally, that was written by the same guy who made dystopian fiction about reality TV and corporate-sponsored vtubers before either thing existed. Andrew Niccol turned out to be amazing at spotting upcoming trends, terrible at identifying how exactly they would ruin things.

Seems like a weird preconception in the first place. I mean, who goes to an opera and wonders if the singers wrote the music? Or watches a movie and wonders if the actors wrote the script?

I don’t even know that non-British places have such a brazen pledge of loyalty to the monarch in the first place.

The one place where I’ve lived that was a Constitutional Monarchy didn’t have public figures swear an oath to the monarch, they just pledge to follow the Constitution (just looked it up, members of the government do mention the monarch in passing, members of parliament do not).

The monarch does pledge to follow the Constitution when they become the monarch, though, so it’s mostly the other way around. At a glance, this seems to be a pretty standard formula.

Brits and the people they’ve permanently damaged just seem particularly into the whole tradition of monarchy and haven’t really toned it down as much as other places. Not that other monarchies don’t have their zealots, but it’s a bit of a different role.

This is true, and I keep forgetting that’s the default to this day until I see it on someone else’s computer and I’m actually startled.

I was downloading a bunch of suspicious crap, but I also was… you know, not opening executables? I feel like you heard a lot about more sophisticated attacks back then, but most of the bad stuff was super obvious. But maybe my experience is not typical, I don’t know.

Did you guys get a lot of viruses in the 00s? I remember bumping into it more back in the good old disk days, where we got infected with skin-to-floppy contact, as the lord intended.

Down 30% for the year, but up 47% from where it was a year ago and 600% of where it was five years ago.

How that happened in the first place is anybody’s guess, but here we are.

Still, 30% in three months is not happy times, even if it’s a long way down to reasonable, let alone rock bottom.

It’s also, because the self-indulgence is starting to rub me the wrong way, entirely unrelated to any online organization. This started a while ago fairly spontaneously and I expect it will keep going the same way. I respect anybody wanting to decouple from a hostile regime, but reining in the US or even winning a trade war aren’t going to happen in social media.

Heroic is pretty much flawless for me. It flakes out less than Linux Steam, honestly. I’m looking at it right now, and it picked up all my GOG installs, it keeps them updated and it does support cloud saves on GOG, although it’s in beta and they caveat enough to make you think twice.

Bit of a tangent, but a thing that has absolutely rekindled that sense of exploring a thing at a time instead of being frozen by choice is Retroachievements.org.

Not only is tracking progress and having leaderboards inherently promoting that in the first place but they have a bunch of community events pointing people at interesting stuff. And they add game coverage one by one, so just looking at the “what’s new” space is a surprisingly fun tool for discovering things you missed, although I imagine jumping in today does that less, since they have almost full coverage of older platforms at this point.

Still, if that’s an issue you feel you’ve been having, I recommend messing with it for that purpose.