The Fediverse is a great system for preventing bad actors from disrupting “real” human-human conversations, because all of the mods, developers and admins are all working out of a desire to connect people (as opposed to “trust and safety” teams more concerned about user retention).

Right now it seems that the Fediverses main protection is that it just isn’t a juicy enough target for wide scale spam and bad faith agenda pushers.

But assuming the Fediverse does grow to a significant scale, what (current or future) mechanisms are/could be in place to fend off a flood of AI slop that is hard to distinguish from human? Even the most committed instance admins can only do so much.

For example, I have a feeling all “good” instances in the near future will eventually have to turn on registration applications and only federate with other instances that do the same. But it’s not crazy to imagine that GPT could soon outmaneuver most registration questions which means registrations will only slow the growth of the problem but not manage it long-term.

Any thoughts on this topic?

  • Bigfoot@lemm.eeOP
    1·
    2 days ago

    Further, there’s nothing that states an interest-based instance needs any registration. One could imagine a world where local instances have all the users and identities, and the interest based instances simply provide communities to the larger fediverse with no users of their own.

    Yes, I’ve had this same thought and I think it’s a great model! If it comes to pass or not remains to be seen. But the concept is good!