Is #Fediverse or #Mastodon structurally more resilient to mass bot accounts? I know that for the moment it seems so, but I'm sure that is primarily because the market is relatively so small, that investing in that makes little sense.
Yet, we are coming closer to situation where AI will be capable to register indistinguishable accounts (or maybe we're here). At the same time, FB might (hopefully) enshittify itself to unbearable levels, which combined to unreliable US policies can make many democracies really hostile to it.
So, my question is: are there serious arguments for fediverse being somewhat futreproof to hostile bots? Can it be projected as a go-to solution for masses, in theory, or will there be a need for some very different long term solution?
volkris
in reply to Justinas Dūdėnas • • •It's complicated because there are both engineering and administrative sides to the question. There's the technology, but there's also enormous human factors.
Technologically, I'd say no, it's not resilient at all to mass bot accounts. In fact, the way the system is structured allows bots to impose serious resource costs on others. That's not a good thing.
In theory it's left to the humans to decide to do things like block instances that host bots, and then the humans running those instances have to figure out ways of keeping bots out if they so desire. The human factors side of the system punts the ball downhill without any solid solution.
I've always been a huge proponent of web of trust solutions to this kind of problem, but that just doesn't exist here.
So in the end I would say no, there is zero resilience against it here.