Fediverse

You can defederate from the corporate servers.

Threads is trying to become that. We have a list of instances blocking Threads here: https://fedipact.veganism.social/

Everything posted on the public web is potential AI training data, federation is completely irrelevant to that.

The rest of your questions has the simple answer that a priori there is nothing "stopping" any of that. You should choose an instance whose admins are looking out for things like that and keeping your experience enjoyable, banning spambots or defederating from spambot farms when they are discovered.

1. Disruption: Probably ethics? I mean, I know big global businesses barely have any, but they do care about their reputation somewhat. Anyone running a botnet to destroy small/medium fediverse servers would be discovered fairly quickly, I suspect. Nothing is going to stop AI training scraping outside of regulation, I suspect.

2. Ads are enshittification. Federation is defense against it, because it prevents vendor lock-in and allows migration while maintaining your network effect. Threads already tried to join, and nearly nothing of theirs gets through. I'm on a mainstream mastodon service that doesn't block threads, and I've seen a threads post only once or twice. Threads can't display their add on my service, so there's no incentive for them to push content.

There's no economical incentive to join the fediverse for large corporations - at least not yet. I think it'll take another 5 years before that happens.

The !boycottusa@lemmy.ca and !buyeuropea@feddit.uk movements would have to become mainstream first, because let's be honest, the fediverse is the actual contender to US social media. Although, right now it's really fediverse vs bluesky. Once someone creates a reddit clone on top of bluesky, then the fediverse will lose that battle, because people are uncomfortable with choice.

Well for the me reason there aren’t as many troll farms operating here in comparison to reddit. There are just not enough users here yet.

Not much to do against scraping. On a small (but actively moderated) instance, a spamming bot will easily be detected and hopefully suspended. Generally, moderation is often better on smaller instances, so I'm not too worried about people migrating towards bigger instances - usually it's the other way round.

For 2. - dedicated corp instances will be defederated from many instances quickly. Bridge accounts on other instances need to be dealt with by the mods.

Yes, of course this can increase moderation effort. But spam accounts are way more easy to deal with from a moderation perspective than issues between real human users which usually takes wayyy more effort to deal with.

Nothing

Nothing. Except that they don't give a shit. Fedi population is tiny and irrelevant.

Let me put it into perspective. Currently Fediverse as a whole has around 50k daily active users and 1.3m monthly active users split between multiple services with Mastodon being the most active. These are the stats for something that exists for over a decade.

I used to work in a company making some social media products. When we launched our main product we had 1m daily active users within a month and I don't remember how many monthly users (that was over 10 years ago). And it just grew from there.

Facebook Threads has 100m daily active users now. The whole Fediverse is a tiny echo chamber and no one cares or knows about its existence.

This in my opinion shouldnt be viewed as a bad thing. If they do then they are joining the fediverse and bringing all their walled garden content over to an open protocol. If this happens we still have the power to choose a server that does not federate with them while their users also have the choice to move to a server that better aligns with their values.

If a big tech company hosted a server and participated like a good citizen then it should be welcomed but if they federate ads then everyone would criticize them and defederate.

You’re potentially right, which is why for my own account I host my own instance. Which I truly understand is not for everyone.

When it comes to communities themselves, that’s a bit more difficult but I am hoping that we (the ‘inhabitants’ of the Fediverse) will ignore those attempt and actively block their instances if it does become a “threat”.

For scraping, I made this point before in a different post, but: the internets public, if we do not want to get scraped, stay in private local communities. The public nature of most communities means you’re out of luck trying to block scraping altogether.

Lack of interest from their part. Right now, they have nothing to gain, fediverse is "small fry", and if the attacks could be traced back to them, they'd have to deal with the PR shitstorm

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI?

They're probably already doing that

The purpose of federation is to build a network that no one entity can control. An evil CEO can enshittify their own server, but the damage they would deal is limited to their server. The rest of the network would still exist outside of their control, and users can easily leave their server to go elsewhere.

As long as it's online and public they can acces the info. But we have tools to fight back. Some instances are private unless you're a member, some choose to defederate, we can ban bots, etc

Nothing is perfect, it's always an ongoing struggle.