I think we all know by now that major social media platforms in the West are the target of multiple astroturfing and psyop campaigns by both private and state actors.
This post, while obvious in implication, is important as it is the first time I have seen this fact discussed on a major site without receiving a large volume of accusations of conspiratorial thought in recent memory. I think there is also an important meta-discussion to be had regarding our role in combating such campaigns as fediverse denizens.
Obviously, we don’t have the manpower to oppose things like this directly. There is additionally the unfortunate reality that we are not as immune here as we might like to think. I personally believe the fediverse likely is subject to similar astroturfing and that to believe otherwise is naive. However, even if there is no major targeting of sites like Lemmy, we are still subject to a trickledown effect from the major social media sites. Popular opinion will be swayed here indirectly by these campaigns regardless of if we are targeted specifically or not.
How can we protect our communities and more importantly our societies?
I think thats the challenge.
With federation, obviously the answer is to de-federate from instances allowing such blatant propaganda.
But what about less blatant forms?
Vote manipulation is obviously against the rules (even supposed to be on Reddit). If we ignore the vote manipulation would any Fediverse rules have been broken?
Looks to me like competing communities have started up and the people that started them are REALLY concerned about riots.
Without vote manipulation they would fizzle out fast and be dead communities / sub Reddits.
Their only hope would be to become the Conservative version of other community; fragmenting communities is hard to do and likely wouldn’t work in such a granular manner
“The fediverse” has no rules, if an instance wants to allow vote manipulation they have that power.
Yeah, I think norms is a better word for it
flooding instances with posts that are blatantly weighted would likely lead to de-federation
That said, the bigger the instance the more power they have to do what they want.
Lemmy.world for instance could put the rest of the Lemmy fediverse between a rock and a hard place if they wanted to
I am sort of talking out my ass; but thats how I understand things as they are right now
We have seen interesting things happen with decentralized systems in the past though.
In IRC land for example Freenode.net went through a hostile takeover which within 24 hours caused operators and admins to jump ship and start their own Freenode (with black jack and hookers) and that seems to have been a success story
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode
beehaw.org is doing great, and they deferated from.world a while ago. Your point is correct though, Mastodon.social for example has half of all Mastodon users.
That said- there is little incentive to having a large instance, it costs a lot more and requires a lot more work.