I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally purchased

It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    191·
    1 day ago

    And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we’d see similar issues. The upside to the frdiverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.

    • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      Fediverse doesn’t (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it’s “self hosted” structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.

      The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.

      Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.

      All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the “AI phrasing”, if anyone catches it.

      • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
        11·
        23 hours ago

        That’s already happening. Bots are posting from open instances, and malicious instances are manipulating votes.

        The best solution I see is allowlisting servers you want to federate with.