Ulu-Mulu-no-die

They’re not telling (rightfully so) and hopefully won’t until all instances are fixed.

Fantastic write-up! Thanks for sharing so hopefully other people can avoid the same problem.

While I could understand this approach for big enterprises, to avoid the hassle of managing thousands of employees PCs, I don’t understand it for home use.

I mean, people who want a PC at home, want it for the multi-purpose capabilities and power in gaming, not to mention full control over it.

Those who only use the PC for email, browsing the internet and watching videos, are better served with a tablet, they’re so powerful nowadays that you don’t really need a PC for those simple tasks, students would be better off with chromebooks, they’re even cheaper, a few types of jobs, like professional graphics for example, are better done with a MAC, and probably other things I’m forgetting right now.

I fully switched to Linux years ago, but if I were still using Windows, I know for sure I’d be furious if my computer stopped working only because the internet went down or MS servers had some downtime.

I’d love to know what they know that I don’t to be so sure this won’t blow up in their faces.

Fantastic news!

Nor did any spam problem eventuate (yet?)

It would seems so, you can see how engagement is still growing regardless of number of accounts declining, that shows spam accounts didn’t actually start spamming yet IMO.

many of these accounts never actually materialised as they never went through email verification

But in that case they shouldn’t be counted in the account number, do they?

This. Stadia was one of the last example, they’ll kill this new service too after a few years, it’s not worth to even consider using.

TIL what the GAFAM empire is.

Besides that, I think the following quote is key:

Google realized that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore

I never used Google Talk nor XMPP but I gather XMPP didn’t have enough users to sustain itself.

Chat systems (and Twitter/Facebook similar platforms) need a very high amount of users to be “sustainable” because they are centered on individuals.

The fediverse doesn’t need that many because is centered around meaningful discussions, having too many is even counterproductive because discussions derail into shitposting (look at reddit).

I agree with the blogger when they say

We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it

Mainly because if we did, lemmy would go down the drain as much as reddit has done the last few years.

I want Meta blocked because I don’t want their shit coming over here, much more than being worried about them trying to extinguish the fediverse, tho you can be sure they will indeed try.

It’s not “me” thinking, there are several posts bringing this problem to the attention of admins, basically they took advantage of servers with open registration to “spam create” thousands of accounts, you don’t see signs because they’re “dormant” for now (that’s what bots do when a spam campaign is not currently active), you can recognize it by confronting number of users with user activity, for example, if you see a server with 6k users and only 5-6 posts, it means it’s a bot farm waiting for a spam campaign to start.

Well, it’s obvious that any public data can be “harvested” by anyone, but with federation there’s also the thing that data gets replicated among all the federated platforms so that each server has actually a copy of that data on it.

I wouldn’t want my posts being stored on their server as a consequence of being federated with them.

you can consume content from their users without being on their platform

Wanting to avoid them and then go getting their content nonetheless, doesn’t seem very coherent to me.

The point of the article is not that defederation should be used as a management tool, but that it can be very effective in protecting the fediverse from becoming a monopoly play among big corps only.

See, you said it yourself, “don’t see tier 1 ISPs de-peering each other”, “don’t see major providers blackholing major providers”, “major players don’t de-peer other major players”, you talk about big players only not blocking each other, but that misses the point of small players being blocked out by the big ones.

quote from the article:

Blocklists for email exist and are shared across services – and blocking is often pre-emptive, not based on suspicious behaviour of that server. Sure, email is an open set of protocols, but it’s also highly restricted by large companies and not at all open to either smaller providers or individuals.

This isn’t just an abstract issue: I know of friends who have had to abandon email servers they ran themselves, sometime literally on a box in the corner of a home office, because the big corporations that dominate email simply wouldn’t deliver anything they send.

That’s the risk, corporations are not stupid, they see the potential in the fediverse right now but they have the nasty habit of “embracing, extending - not always extinguishing but making it almost impossible for new competitors to enter the market”.

They could totally ruin the fediverse if left unchecked.

Are mastodon users really going to to use meta alternatives? Isn’t the purpose of the fediverse to escape corporations control?

Why would anyone in their right state of mind, go from a free alternative (as in free speech, not free beer) back into the hands of a corporation?

How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts?

Probably half of them are bots.

Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?

Yes, and it’s quite serious.

The bright side IMO is lemmy is being recognized as a valid alternative to reddit, if it wasn’t, bots would have no reason to try and be here.

Leaking industry secrets is a much bigger concern that boosting productivity a little bit.

We’re talking about very specialized engineering work, it’s not something you can totally rely on a bot to do, though it might help sometimes, it’s fully understandable for specialized companies to want to ban GPT internally, until there’s a way for them to host a totally internal one.

Yeah MS did kill their phones but that’s nothing like Google launching dozens of new services then killing them after a few years, Google has unfortunately been doing that for quite a long time.

Probably, but if you monetize “my data” (by tracking everything I do + the content I put on your site) you won’t get any ad revenue from me (I use old.reddit + ublock origin too).

If you don’t and you give me a service that’s valuable to me then I’m willing to pay (I pay for protonmail for example).

I agree, I’m not particularly fond of Apple but they’re indeed reliable.

Will they ever stop creating new services only to shut them down a few years later?

No wonder people don’t trust them anymore.