No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse as well and I'm not feeling quite as optimistic as the author here. But they're absolutely right about the corporate side of the internet. The mainstream that is controlled by the rich and driven by greed. You need FOSS to have at least a good base you can build on top of. Profit oriented platforms have failed us as a society.

[–] JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 points 14 hours ago

heck if anything, the Fediverse, as it is right now, is more susceptible to this. You can spin up spam instances on new domains, with spam users, and have them federate to existing instances, faster than volunteer run instances can ban/defederate.

So you end up with not federating by default, but having some trusted web of instances that federate and maybe an approval process for new instances to federate with? But that'll still lead to centralization with "trusted" instances and new instances having a hard time to join the club (there's also the scaling problem of the fediverse, but that's besides the point). So you end up with a few very big instances and the owners of those instances having all the power. Or maybe small isolated islands of mutually trusting instances? Still better than tech oligopoly, but also a far cry from the original dream.

[–] HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com 38 points 4 days ago

Totally. Social media (and other types of computing platforms I guess) need to be more grassroots and not driven by profit.

[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 20 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse

Yeah, but there's a huge difference: human moderation coupled with better curation tools. You can block a user or a whole instance, which quiets the Nazis pretty fast.

And the people doing the moderation are volunteers who actually give a shit.