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.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
@a1studmuffin @ceenote the only reason these massive Web 2.0 platforms achieved such dominance is because they got huge before governments understood what was happening and then claimed they were too big to follow basic publishing law or properly vet content/posters. So those laws were changed to give them their own special carve-outs. We’re not mentally equipped for social networks this huge.
I disagree, I think we’re built for social networks that huge. The problems happen when money comes into the equation. If we lived in a world without price tags, and resources went where they needed to go instead of to who has the most money, and we were free to experiment with new lifestyles and ideas, we would thrive with a huge and diverse social network. Money is like a religious mind-virus that triggers psycopathy and narcissism in human beings by design, yet we believe in it like it’s a force of nature like God or something. A new enlightenment is happening all thanks to huge social networks allowing us to express our nature, it’s the institutions of control that aren’t equipped to handle such breakdown of social barriers (like the printing press protestant revolution, or the indigenous critiques before the enlightenment period)
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.
Could do something like discord. Rather than communities, you have “micro instances” existing on top of the larger instance, and communities existing within the micro instances. And of course make it so that making micro instances are easier to create.
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.
I was referring to some of the larger players in the space, ie Meta, Twitter, etc.
Right, but they’re shit and don’t good things out of principle.
We, the Fediverse, are the alternative to them.
Doesn’t matter if they’re shit or not, they don’t want bots crawling their sites, straining their resources, or constantly shit posting, but they do anyway. And if the billion dollar corporations can’t stop them, it’s probably a good bet that you can’t either.
Because they want user data over anything.
We want quality communities over anything.
We can be selective, they go bankrupt without consistent growth.
It could be cool to get a blue check mark for hosting your own domain (excluding the free domains)
It would be more expensive than bot armies are willing to deal with.
Well, what doesn’t work, it seems, is giving (your) access to “anyone”.
Maybe a system where people, I know this will be hard, has to look up outlets themselves, instead of being fed a “stream” dictated by commercial incentives (directly or indirectly).
I’m working on a secure decentralised FOSS network where you can share whatever you want, like websites. Maybe that could be a start.
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
Well no?
What did I miss?
I’m speaking broadly in general terms in the post, about sharing online.
This conversation was about bots. Yours is about “outlets” and “streams”, whatever that is.
If you have some algorithm or few central points distributing information, any information, you’ll get bot problems. If you instead yourself hook up with specific outlets, you won’t have that problem, or if one is bot infested you can switch away from it. That’s hard when everyone is in the same outlet or there are only few big outlets.
Sorry if it’s not clear.
How is it going to be as big as reddit if EVERYONE is vetted?
Why do you want it to be as big as Reddit?
There might be clever ways of doing this: Having volunteers help with the vetting process, allowing a certain number of members per day + a queue and then vetting them along the way…
Can you have an instance that allows viewing other instances, but others can’t see in?
Vetted members could still bot though or have ther accounts compromised. Not a realistic solution.
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.
the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
The sad truth is that when Reddit blocked 3rd party apps, and the mods revolted, Reddit was able to drive away the most nerdy users and the disloyal moderators. And this made Reddit a more mainstream place that even my sister and her friends know about now.
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.
Your last sentence highlights the problem. I can have a bot that posts for me. Also, if an authority is in charge of issuing the certificates then they have an incentive to create some fake ones.
Bots are vastly more useful as the ratio of bots to humans drops.
Also the problem of relying on a nation state to allow these certificates to be issued in the first place. A repressive regime could simply refuse to give its citizens a certificate, which would effectively block them from access to a platform that required them.
we have to use trust from real life. it’s the only thing that centralized entities can’t fake
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.
I subscribed to the arch gitlab last week and there was a 12 step identification process that was completely ridiculous. It’s clear 99.99% of users will just give up.
What? I post a lot, but the majority?
…oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
The rest of us with brains, that don’t post our status as if the entire world cares, will likely be here, or some place similar… Screaming into the wind.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
That’s going right into /dev/null as soon as I detect it-- both user and content.
Also is data scraping as much of an issue?
Data scraping is a logical consequence of being an open protocol, and as such I don’t think it’s worth investing much time in resisting it so long as it’s not impacting instance health. At least while the user experience and basic federation issues are still extant.
Decentralized authentication system that support pseudonymous handles. The authentication system would have optional verification levels.
So I wouldn’t know who you are but I would know that you have verified against some form of id.
The next step would then by attributes one of which is your real name but also country of birth, race, gender, and other non-mutable attributes that can be used but not polled.
So I could post that I am Bob living in Arizona and I was born in Nepal and those would be tagged as verified, but someone couldn’t reverse that and request if I want to post without revealing those bits of data.
We need digital identities, like, yesterday.
Yeah I’m not seeing any way around that sadly. At least for places where you want/need to know the content is from an actual person.
Precisely, and it can stay pseudo-anonymous. A trusted third party (Governments? Banks? A YMCA gym membership?) issuing a hashed certificate or token is all that’s needed. You don’t need to know my name, age, gender: but if you could confirm that I DO have those attributes, and X, Y, and Z parties confirmed it, then it’s likely I’m a human.
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.
There are simple tests to out LLMs, mostly things that will trip up the tokenizers or sampling algorithms (with character counting being the most famous example). I know people hate captchas, but it’s a small price to pay.
Also, while no one really wants to hear this, locally hosted “automod” LLMs could help seek out spam too. Or maybe even a Kobold Hoard type “swarm.”
Captchas don’t do shit and have actually been training for computer vision for probably over a decade at this point.
Also: Any “simple test” is fixed in the next version. It is similar to how people still insist “AI can’t do feet” (much like rob liefeld). That was fixed pretty quick it is just that much of the freeware out there is using very outdated models.
I’m talking text only, and there are some fundamental limitations in the way current and near future LLMs handle certain questions. They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models. It’s honestly way better than image captchas.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop. They will either give a incorrect answer to try and continue the loop, or if their sampling is overturned, give incorrect answers avoiding instances where the loop is the correct answer.
They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models.
And that is solved just by keeping a non-processed version of the query (or one passed through a different grammar to preserve character counts and typos). It is not a priority because there are no meaningful queries where that matters other than a “gotcha” but you can be sure that will be bolted on if it becomes a problem.
Again, anything this trivial is just a case of a poor training set or an easily bolted on “fix” for something that didn’t have any commercial value outside of getting past simple filters.
Sort of like how we saw captchas go from “type the third letter in the word ‘poop’” to nigh unreadable color blindness tests to just processing computer vision for “self driving” cars.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop.
If you make someone answer multiple questions just to shitpost they are going to go elsewhere. People are terrified of lemmy because there are different instances for crying out loud.
You are also giving people WAY more credit than they deserve.
Well, that’s kind of intuitively true in perpetuity
An effective gate for AI becomes a focus of optimisation
Any effective gate with a motivation to pass will become ineffective after a time, on some level it’s ultimately the classic “gotta be right every time Vs gotta be right once” dichotomy—certainty doesn’t exist.
@NuXCOM_90Percent @brucethemoose would some kind of proof of work help solve this? Ifaik its workingnon tor
Somehow I didn’t get pinged for this?
Anyway proof of work scales horrendously, and spammers will always beat out legitimate users of that even holds. I think Tor is a different situation, where the financial incentives are aligned differently.
But this is not my area of expertise.
Reputation systems. There is tech that solves this but Lemmy won’t like it (blockchain)
You don’t need blockchain for reputations systems, lol. Stuff like Gnutella and PGP web-of-trust have been around forever. Admittedly, the blockchain can add barriers for some attacks; mainly sybil attacks, but a friend-of-a-friend/WoT network structure can mitigate that somewhat too,
Slashdot had this 20 years ago. So you’re right this is not new.or needing some new technology.
Space is much more developed. Would need ever improving dynamic proof of personhood tests
I think a web-of-trust-like network could still work pretty well where everyone keeps their own view of the network and their own view of reputation scores. I.e. don’t friend people you don’t know; unfriend people who you think are bots, or people who friend bots, or just people you don’t like. Just looked it up, and wikipedia calls these kinds of mitigation techniques “Social Trust Graphs” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack#Social_trust_graphs . Retroshare kinda uses this model (but I think reputation is just a hard binary, and not reputation scores).
I dont see how that stops bots really. We’re post-Turing test. In fact they could even scan previous reputation points allocation there and divise a winning strategy pretty easily.
I mean, don’t friend, or put high trust on people you don’t know is pretty strong. Due to the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon, it scales pretty easily as well. If you have stupid friends that friend bots you can cut them off all, or just lower your trust in them.
“Post-turing” is pretty strong. People who’ve spent much time interacting with LLMs can easily spot them. For whatever reason, they all seem to have similar styles of writing.
I mean, don’t friend, or put high trust on people you don’t know is pretty strong. Due to the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon, it scales pretty easily as well. If you have stupid friends that friend bots you can cut them off all, or just lower your trust in them.
Know IRL? Seems it would inherently limit discoverability and openness. New users or those outside the immediate social graph would face significant barriers to entry and still vulnerable to manipulation, such as bots infiltrating through unsuspecting friends or malicious actors leveraging connections to gain credibility.
“Post-turing” is pretty strong. People who’ve spent much time interacting with LLMs can easily spot them. For whatever reason, they all seem to have similar styles of writing.
Not the good ones, many conversations online are fleeting. Those tell-tale signs can be removed with the right prompt and context. We’re post turing in the sense that in most interactions online people wouldn’t be able to tell they were speaking to a bot, especially if they weren’t looking - which most aren’t.
Do you have a proof of concept that works?
Are they just putting everything on layer 1, and committing to low fees? If so, then it won’t remain decentralized once the blocks are so big that only businesses can download them.
It has adjustable block size and computational cost limits through miner voting, NiPoPoWs enable efficient light clients. Storage Rent cleans up old boxes every four years. Pruned (full) node using a UTXO Set Snapshot is already possible.
Plus you don’t need to bloat the L1, can be done off-chain and authenticated on-chain using highly efficient authenticated data structures.
We also need a solution to fucking despot mods and admins deleting comments and posts left-and-right because it doesn’t align with their personal views.
I’ve seen it happen to me personally across multiple Lemmy domains (I’m a moron and don’t care much to have empathy in my writing, and it sets these limp-wrist morbidly obese mods/admins to delete my shit and ban me), and it happens to many people as well.
Yeah you can go fuck yourself for pinning your flavor of bullshit on ADHD. Take some accountability for your actions.
So much irony in this one
Good job chief 🤡
Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences. As someone who loves to engage on trolling for a laugh online I can tell you that if you get banned for being an asshole you deserve it. I know I have.
- Dude says he is regarded BC reasons in civil manner
- Another dude proceeds to aggressively insult him… I would say not civil.
Who is the asshole here?
limp- wrist morbidly obese
That tells me all I need to know
Yes
I do indeed fuck myself, every day, thanks.
You have that tool, it’s called finding or hosting your own instance.
lemm.ee and lemmy.dbzer0.com both seem like very level-headed instances. You can say stuff even if the admins disagree with it, and it’s not a crisis.
Some of the big other ones seem some other way, yes.
Lemm.ee hasn’t booted me yet? Much like OP, I’m not the most empathetic person, and if I’m annoyed then what little filter that I have disappears.
Shockingly, I might offend folks sometimes!
Just create your own comm.
Communities should be self moderated. Once we have that we can really push things forward.
Self Moderated is just fine. Why do I need to doxx myself to be online? I’m not giving away my birth certificate or SSN just to post on social media that idea is crazy lmao.
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
More heads require more guillotines.
Can we not design guillotines that cut multiple heads at once, thus reducing the head to guillotine ratio?
You’re onto something here.
I guess we could stack the rich on top of each other. That way we wouldn’t even have to modify the guillotine. We’d just have to make sure the blade is extra sharp.
Make the design 4D, and stack them in multiple dimensions, maybe one 4D guillotine is even sufficient?
And for testing purposes, we could try them on the designers!
What a blast!
What really matters is the back-to-nose distance, this gives you the head-per-chop ratio but also drives the max-head-per-chop value which itself depends on the blade weight and max blade height which limited by the ceiling height if inside or the max free standing of the pillars if outside.
This guy guillotines.
Are we foementing revolution or creating a new compression algorithm?
Yes, we’re trying to quantize multiple ceos into a single guillotine operation
Based
The heads yearn for the guillotines
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
actually, if we could remove the sociopaths from power, it would allow academics to over. it’s not that hard to engineer a society where people aren’t like they are now. we’re learned behavior creatures. it’s possible to unlearn what we know now and teach our children to never be this way again.
Hey, that’s us!
If social media becomes decentralized we might even gain traction reversing some of the brainwashing on the masses. The current giants are just propaganda machines. Always have been, but it’s now blatant and obvious. They don’t even care to hide it.
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had “social media”, but it’s not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn’t a tweet, but for our monkey brains it’s essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what’s going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn’t be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you’re pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we’ve always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it’s influence.
You certainly could tell cavemen stories to manipulate them, back then.
The difference was you could only reach one campfire at a time. Nowadays the whole Internet is one campfire, metaphorically.
Lol chimpanzees kill each other in literal wars with torture, kidnapping, extortion, terrorism and more, and you think a caveman never thought of lying about the enemy group?
The previous post didn’t talk about inter-campfire relations. It talked about relations between people in one campfire. Relations with outsiders have always been fucky. It’s a miracle how the EU even came to be in the first place with how different everything/everyone is.
There’s a big difference between sitting around a fire telling stories. And sending pseudonymous click-baity messages (I’m slightly exaggerating) across the globe.
As it’s not guaranteed anymore: Have you sit around a fire with friends? IME it’s so much more fulfilling and less prone to hate. Healthier (apart of the smoke). There’s so much more to communication than text messages.
There’s a big difference between sitting around a fire telling stories. And sending pseudonymous click-baity messages (I’m slightly exaggerating) across the globe.
Totally agree, except that regardless of how smart a person is…all our brains are pretty dumb and easy to fool. If reading stupid click-bait messages on the internet triggers the same connections as having a talk around the fire, then to our brains it’s literally the same. And it has all the same things, just more so. Is someone more likely to lie to you for their own ends on the internet? Probably, but your best friend would like to your face if their mental maths figured that lying would benefit them more than telling the truth. Not saying that society is doomed because we’re all inherently selfish and don’t care about the welfare of anyone past ourselves. But to say that social media doesn’t fill the same function as village gatherings, the town crier exclaiming news where you might not get word, or gathering around the fire with Oogtug and Feffaguh to tell eachother about your day…in the current era, when people are more socially isolated than ever? Nah. Doesn’t track for me.
all our brains are pretty dumb and easy to fool.
Absolutely, but I think that when we’re talking to actually smart people in person we at least subconsciously more likely believe the person that actually has to say something (i.e. really knows something we don’t). With social media a lot of these communication factors are missing, so if the text sounds smart, we may believe it. Sure you can fake and lie, etc. but I think (going back in time) we have a good instinct for people that may help us in any way i.e. through knowledge where to find food, find secure shelter etc. stuff that helps our survival, which in the end for humans is basically good factual knowledge that helps the survival of the species as a whole.
Today our attention spans are reduced to basically nothing to a large part because of social media promoting emotional (unfortunately mostly negative/anxiety/anger) short messages (and ads of course) that reinforce whatever we believe which likely strengthens bad connections in the brain.
Also the sheer mass of information is very likely not good for us. I.e. mostly nonfactual information, because well, there’s way more people that “have heard about something” than actually researched and gone down to the ground to get the truth (or at least a good model of it).
This all mixed, well doesn’t give me a positive outlook unfortunately…
I keep putting off replying to this, because it deserves a good, well thought reply. I’ve not got the mental space for it.
Suffice to say, I think what you said tracks with what I was stabbing at. And I agree. I’ll keep this as unread and maybe come back over the weekend if I can get my thoughts together.
There was not a 8 billion people supply chain back then.
Yeah, which actually underlines my point even. We weren’t “designed” for connecting with everyone around the world. Evolutionary there were smaller groups, sometimes having contact with other groups.
Today we can just connect with our bubbles (like here on lemmy) and get validated and reinforce our beliefs independently if they are right or wrong (mostly factually). As we see this doesn’t seems to be healthy for most people. In smaller circles (like scientific community) this helps, but in general… Well I don’t think I have to explain the situation on the world (and especially currently in the USA) currently…
This is the better path forward… That everyone just gets so sick of it that they drop it - I’ve actually seen a lot of that among my own friends over the last week (and we aren’t from America even). But the right wingers will never drop it because it’s their community and echo chamber, and that’s where the further dangers to democracy come into play when they’re all in the sandbox together without parents…
There’s another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?
deleted by creator
Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.
I could live without all the news and stuff, and I do just ignore it when it gets too much. The ability to communicate with other people across the entire world however is something I really appreciate.
I’m actually going to suggest; Yes, possibly. But for a very specific reason.
While much of social media isn’t ultra necessary, federated social media could be quite essential to collectivising and resisting state and corporate manipulation and propaganda. All other forms of media and news are corporate or state controlled, and thus can construct and project false narritives that are beneficial to their aims, much to our collective detriment.
Social media has become the dominant way that many, possibly most people, see the news, discuss such news with eachother from people around the globe, and build a picture of what’s going on outside of their isolated part of the world. I think Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent gives a pretty fantastic argument on the importance of citizen controlled media, and federated social media is about as citizen controlled as it can possibly get. It’s non-corporate self-hosted open source software as far as the eye can see! It’s not perfect, but holy shit this is as powerful as a tool to diseminate ideas and information on a grassroots level that we’ve ever had, and we should not underestimate its usefulness in the coming decade.
We wouldn’t be having this conversation though.
I do love to crank ma hog with my bröthers, arooooo
Sounds great, but completely unrealistic. People have almost universally embraced social media because we’re social animals. How would it disappear, short of an outright global ban?
Sometimes when it gets overwhelming I don’t do any news or social media at all for a few weeks. It seems to help my mental health, particularly when every bit of news suggests that everything is going to shit.
when you stick your hand on a hot stove and feel pain, it’s so you know to do something about it. you don’t want to shut that off.
Yeah that’s a fair point. Thing is, I don’t know what to do about this shit (Gestures to world). I used to get involved in a lot of direct action when I was younger but I’m a bit old for that now. And I can’t really say that all the times I got battered by the police, arrested on airbases, shit like that - I’m not sure I made any difference at all. Some of those actions made headlines but those were mostly negative. And I know people say “Vote!” - but I do, and that doesn’t seem to help either.
So yeah, sometimes I just don’t use the stove for a while. I just feel a bit fuckin defeated.
if you got nothing left to lose, take some bad guys with you
if you’re too old to fight, help organize a local leftist militia.
if you don’t want to get involved directly, help amplify the message that we have to take the fight to them.
if you don’t want to end up on a list, help develop and distribute forms of encrypted communication software.
if you can’t do any of that, i don’t know, go live in the woods or something.
just please, please stop participating in these online circle jerks where we pacify ourselves with meaningless platitudes. these are the antithesis of helpful to the cause.
My mom asked what she should replace FB/Insta with and I reminded her we lived decades without them so we just go back to that.
Let’s call it by it’s name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
In the same way that email has been decentralized from the get go, social media could have been equally decentralized, and I don’t mean in the older php forums, but in a different way that would allow people to reconnect with others and maintain contacts.
I’m currently reading The Expanse, and at one point a character mentions checking in on the family aggregator his cousin set up to help everyone keep track of who’s living where.
Dude spun up a private Lemmy instance for his family. The future is now!
I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what’s happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It’s why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There’s more going on behind the scenes that they don’t share with us. I think we’re sort of watching a quiet coup.
1000% agree. There is no freedom but the freedom that we build together.
if 100% is completely agreeing, what’s 1000%?
completely agreeing, 10 times
Preaching to the choir!
It might be good to reiterate (in part) why we’re all in here.
I want not just decentralized
but peer to peer
like Briar, but Lemmy-style
I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive
