I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.

Bots can disrupt smaller instances:

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What's stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It's safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.

Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:

Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all instances to flood major them with ads. With generative content, it is so much easier to make a seemingly casual post about a product and mask it as an advertisement.

I've seen previous posts about people wanting to come because of their opinion about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.

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[–] mimavox@lemm.ee 2 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Yes, except that you can't really do that with open source things. If one instance/a particular piece of software gets compromised, you can always spawn a new one / fork a new project etc.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 30 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

EEE was designed for open standards/projects.

For example, google talk originally used xmpp. They kept adding features that broke on the xmpp side of things, until people effectively used google talk. They then cut of xmpp, after successfully killing it.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

This is not what really happend. Yes initially they added features other XMPP implementations had trouble to catch up with, but the main problem was them not implementing important security features like s2s TLS encryption, thus forcing others to cut them off. Google continued to run their xmpp servers for many years after, but they were so badly maintained and insecure no one wanted to interact with them anymore.

The rest of the xmpp ecosystem continued to grow at a slow pace and is alive and well, it was just an annoying set back going from being able to contact many millions of users on their Gmail linked xmpp accounts to not being able to do that anymore.

[–] Eril@feddit.org 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Every time someone brings up xmpp and how Google extinguished it, I wonder if xmpp afterwards was somehow worse of than they would have been if Google never had embraced it. I don't know, but my gut feeling would be that Google mostly just extinguished whatever they brought in in the first place and in that case EEE would be harmless. Am I wrong? If so, please explain.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Mostly yes, but people were a bit naive back then and many onboarded friends and family onto the Gmail service and that burned some bridges and good-will as for Gmail users other xmpp users simply ended up as if offline and never responding.

[–] frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 11 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

That's about the only thing they can do with open-source things.

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago

It helps, in the case of Linux, that it’s tightly gate-kept by Linus. Now when he steps down, I will worry for the project.