this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Someone is really out to get lemmy.world lately.
I feel like with every update there is at least one attack.
We're having fun and trying to build a positive space. And we have real potential to succeed in growing large. Can you think of a single faster way to attract trolling on the internet?
It's a lot more likely than someone like spez taking a break from plundering his company to piss off a modest number of internet randos in some internet corner somewhere, which would barely be a drop in the bucket of his problem anyway.
The overall effect of this is so small, it almost has to be someone(s) with too much time on their hands. If they had any kind of real power, they wouldn't be wasting their time on these chump change attacks.
Honestly, decentralized social media are probably bad news for the current state of the art of disinformation campaigns. The bullshit that has been thriving on Facebook and Twitter is not only a chorus of bigoted aunts and uncles, but (perhaps more importantly) a coordinated attack from state sponsored troll farms seeking, among other things, to destabilise Western democracies.
The fediverse is, by design, less vulnerable to these attacks. Your trolls can generate activity around your disinformation content all they want: if nobody I follow boosts it, it's not going to show up in my Mastodon feed. And you can feel free to recreate r/conservative or whatever in the fediverse, but if it becomes a cesspool like on Reddit you'll be stuck with your trolls talking to each other on a defederated instance with no-one listening. Disinformation strategies currently employed successfully on centralized social media platforms are likely to fail here, causing a problem for bad actors.
It is probably paranoid to think there's any geopolitical actor behind the current attack, but I fully expect the fediverse to become under attack from Russian troll farms as soon as they realize they're no longer reaching out to people on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook.
If you don't think state sponsored troll farms exist in the "West," I've got a bridge to sell you.
From 2011: US government working on Persona Management "sock puppet" software to flood forums with pro-US talking points
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
From 2013: US ally Israel pays Israeli college students to defend Israeli government online
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-students-social-media/2651715/
From 2014: Reddit lists Eglin Air Force base as the most "Reddit Addicted City"
https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/
From 2014: Research done at Eglin Air Force Base in 2014 about influence of opinions through "a decentralized potential field-based influence algorithm is developed in this work to ensure that all individuals’ states achieve consensus asymptotically to a desired convex hull spanned by the stationary leaders’ states, while maintaining consistent influence between individuals (i.e., network connectivity)."
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
From 2018: Facebook works with Cambridge Analytica to undermine US elections
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html
Can we stop acting like we're the fucking good guys in this? It's absolutely fair that there are Russian troll-farms pushing disinformation, but to act like there are only Russian troll farms and they only exist to destabilize western democracies is a fucking joke.
Last I checked, there are plenty of US conservatives and rich people who want to dismantle democracy and these people own fucking news organizations, we don't even need to go to Russian troll farms for that horseshit. It's fucking home-grown. (I mean Musk and Murdoch weren't even born in America and these two dipshits control some of the biggest names in US media I can think of, and both of these motherfuckers hate democracy. Reddit's Steve Huffman literally looks up to Musk. Facebook is MAGA central because of Mark Zuckerberg.)
So let's stop acting like the phone call isn't coming from inside the house. When the state-actors show up, it's gonna be all of them not just some of them.
You'll notice I only mentioned Russia once, and not even in the paragraph you cited. The Russian troll farms are without doubt the most famous, and they have backed candidates like Farage, Trump and Le Pen with uncanny success. But it would be incredibly naive to think other actors are not involved with similar strategies, which is why I kept my post general. Steve Bannon has his ties to Russia, but he's American as apple pie.
You listed a few interesting things and seemed miss an important one.
I might be a bit wrong in what I'm about to say, but the basics are right. Meta released a chatGPT like LLMs source code and had their weights leaked. Their model is named LLaMA.
People have been messing around with LLaMA inspired LLMs on their personal computers thanks to meta for months now.
Bad actor LLM bots are now a hobbyist level task. The fediverse is showing signs of not significantly caring or trying. Imo, Lemmy instances aren't ready for this.
https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/
The US government as a whole, comparatively, are the good guys in this. The US government is pretty cautious and tends to shy away from spreading propaganda to its own people.
There are a lot of caveats there, absolutely. I'll get into some of those. But let's not pretend the US government is on par with the Russian or Chinese governments when it comes to social media propaganda.
The GOP being in bed with the Russians and collaboratively pushing narratives is not being done on behalf of the government. And I doubt whatever is happening at Elgin is targeting Americans.
I don't think "not targeting their own citizens" is quite the flex you think it is when it comes to pushing disinformation and misinformation.
Bootlicker
I agree with this entirely.
Maybe it was their refusal to take a stance on Meta and Threads? The admins of .ml said it took them 2 minutes to decide to preemptively defederate. .World on the other hand came to an anti-corporate platform and publicly took a position that they would wait and see about federation with Meta.
It's like saying "power to the people and viva revolution but we are also remaining open to licking boot depending on the circumstances."
I do not believe that the Fediverse is an exclusively anti-corporate platform. It's nature is open to all, even corporations, at a technical level.
Granted, many anti-corporate people came here, but that doesn't make this a fundamently anti-corporate place. Just their specific communities.
I also doubt many serious Fediverse types are that petty and childish. That's generally a trait of more short-sighted people. Not a lot of native trolls here, we came here in many cases to escape that behavior.
Is it so strange to think some assholes might just chase us down and bring it to us? What would you do if you were a hate-fueled asshole that wanted to watch the world burn? I'd find nice things and fuck them up, personally. That would be both fun and potentially effective.
The FOSS alternative to the big corporate controlled social media corps that swallow up smaller social media alternatives is not anti-corporate? Ok.
Linux runs on something like 90% of corporate servers. Amazon's AWS runs its own version of Linux and is the largest cloud provider in existence.
This means, by and large, the labor done on a volunteer basis by random internet nerds to create Linux and all its tools has unintentionally been the largest transfer of wealth created by labor from the working class to the corporate class in fucking history.
FOSS means anyone can use it for any reason. Including organizations you reasonably fucking hate using it for reasons you fucking hate.
It's literally why in the last few years you had maintainers of open source projects sabotaging their own projects when learning what it is being used for, or trying to make "new rules" that don't allow certain organizations to use their code (pro-tip, if they can access your code, they can use it).
Only now is the FOSS community waking up to the fact that corporations are using their open ideals to profit off of their labor very handsomely.
If there's one thing that capitalism is excellent at, it's taking valid critiques of capitalism, and then repackaging those critique and selling them back to the very public that is critiquing them. There's a reason Meta has already jumped in on ActivityPub, because its a new market to exploit.
The early internet was nothing but counterculture and lack of corporations. Corporations showed up because it was a new market to exploit and they used their largess to dominate the conversation. It happened before, it will happen again.
Depressing, but I can't disagree.
Fully agree with all of that. The difference I see with ActivityPub is that we can say they can use it all they want but we won't be connecting with them or interacting with their users at all.
And they honestly probably won't care, but it makes it clear where the rest of us stand and communicates to current Fediverse users a commitment to stay as free as possible from corporate influence. I felt like there was no room for milquetoast answers to that question.
The whole point of lemmy.world is that it's a general, welcome-to-all instance.
If you want server admins who take overtly political stances and actions on behalf of their users, you have instances like lemmy.ml to choose from.
I literally left Lemmy.world and stopped recurring donations to switch to Lemmy.ml
But you're muddying the waters with a disingenuous argument. They can be open to all individual users without being open to connection with possibly the worst actor in the social media space.
You're also mischaracterizing staying free of giant corporate influence as "taking overtly political actions blah blah on behalf of its users" and starting to sound 100% like a corporate shill with absolutely dogshit arguments that only a moron wouldn't see through.
Who is worse, Meta or the people who want nothing to do with Meta?
The answer to that is extremely easy.
Protecting their users from bad actors is exactly what server admins should be doing as good admins. That's not political, and go lick boot somewhere else.
Sounds like you made the right choice for yourself.
I wish you the best.
Thank you and you too. I apologize that I didn't make my point more civilly. I'm an old-ass techie that has seen enshitification ruin just about every new frontier and being noncommittal about keeping them out while we have a chance is, to me, a surefire recipe to have big capital ruin this little experiment in freedom. I think that you just have to study Meta's history to assure yourself that their intentions are always self-serving and never in the public interest. My incivility is purely because of how strongly I loathe them, not you. Take care.
You seem nice
I genuinely am. Part of why I hate Meta, Reddit, and Twitter is how callously they treat their users. The reason that I have very little patience for people that stick up for them is that I don't like bullies or the enabling of bullies. Go take a look at the app permissions required to use Threads and tell me that any "nice" person would think it's ok to harvest that much data. We are livestock to them.
They explained the situation very well, and it's not exactly as you described it.
Thread is outside the fediverse now, so there is literally nothing to defederate.
And they already basically admitted that in case of threads federating, they would defederate.
It was one of the few instances (if not the only one) to put down exactly what practical problems federating would cause instead of simply taking an ethical stance or regurgitating the usual nonsense EEE argument.
But people wanted an immediate, strong and ethical stance (which is also understandable), so they didn't like the wait and they didn't care about an objective analysis of pro and cons
Yeah, to quote the Joker here "it's about sending a message." Doesn't matter about the technical reality, it just would've determined the wording. "If they try to federate with us, we won't have any of it."
I didn't see them say that though, saw a Mastodon post and an admin thread on .world that specifically said they would wait and see.
Yeah, but the admin clarified in some replies that the moderation problems and possibility of receiving ads are already enough to choose to defederate. They didn't give the absolute certainty but basically made their intentions clear.
But I agree with you, most people wanted to get a clear message against it and not just a "if that happens we will very likely defederate".
I still think both approaches are fine, it's good to decide by ethics and it's good to wait and decide by rationality too. No wrong choices, it's just a matter of preference
White hat attackers maybe?
White hat attackers do not take down infrastructure, that is by definition a black hat act. White hat attackers would merely discover exploits and report them to owners.
it's one of the biggest instances, not really surprising that bad actors are targeting it