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?
“Power tripping mods” definitionally cannot exist on the fediverse where anyone can create an instance or community. Even on Reddit, 99% of the time someone said a mod was “power tripping” it was just a right winger upset that the mod removed their disruptive nonsense.
The purpose of communities like the one you linked to is to shame mods into employing a passive, generic bare-minimum style of moderation, when we should be encouraging the opposite if we want diversity in the fediverse.
Three examples from that community, where other people can discuss the moderation, and see whether it’s power tripping or not.
Right wingers aren’t that numberous of Lemmy, but when this happens it gets quickly disqualified by the people commenting
Enjoy your empty community nobody cares about because people post on the one where most of the people are, where the power tripping mod is operating
Mods and admins on the Fediverse are not democratically elected, they have complete control. Accusing one of “power tripping”, in their own community, on the instance they presumably pay for, is not a rational accusation, since they definitionally cannot exist in a state of less power. What that community is trying to do is use the threat of public shaming to influence behavior. It’s how you get weak moderation and generic communities where bad actors can thrive. A community dedicated to “Stopping bad mods” sounds good on the surface, but it’s an argument made in bad faith.
The first sentence you wrote is either misleading or incorrect, and I think it’s important to reexamine. Each administrator has control over the instance they run, but they don’t have control over the Fediverse itself, and because it’s so easy for people to move to other instances, they have little control over other users.
Mods don’t pay for the instance, they aren’t in charge of any of it.
Some admins have strong policies against getting involved into moderation of communities, leaving potential power tripping mods unchecked.
Power tripping mods can exist anywhere there are mods, even here. The rest of your point stands though.
It’s theirs. They can do whatever they want. Any limits their power within the instance/community is purely voluntary on the part of the owner.
Instance = admin, community = mod, but either can still power trip within the confines of their little worlds.