1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War organized an Anarchist society with over 3 million participants, and they documented much of how exactly they ran it, right down to how they kept the electric trams for public transport going (there is a fantastic book embedded at the bottom of that article, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution by Gaston Leval, which offers more details on other aspects of how they operated that society).

It’s a fantastic historical event we can learn from and build upon, and it bore out quite effectively that a decentralized society functions quite well.

There’s a couple ways to use Lemmy and make it nicer to use, one is curating a well fleshed out subscribed list, the other is using all but blocking every community that doesn’t interest you or has topics you actively dislike, making it just as pleasant as your subscribed view.

Personally I do both. My subscribed view is just things I like and no news communities. My All feed blocks everything I don’t like, let’s me discover new communities, and gives me a dose of news when I want it.

The ones at the bottom that are below the None category aren’t defederated from anyone, so they can access every instance.

He did, his instance was dubvee(.)org. i guess that wasn’t good enough 🤷

there is a significant probability we already are at this point,

I personally don’t believe that we are, not here, anyway. If I browse reddit for a while, I get the feeling that it is overran with bots at this point (like, 45 to 50% bots, based on my own subjective intuitions), as I’m not sure reddit itself is actually fighting it all that hard (on the surface, it would seem like AI traffic that isn’t ‘discovered’ to be AI traffic would still be useful to them to artificially boost user numbers for investors as well as for ad revenue. In other words, I’m not sure they have a strong incentive to weed out AI users, at least in respect to short-term profits? Though I could be wrong).

Lemmy/Piefed on the other hand still don’t appear to be very bot-ridden yet, maybe 5 to 10% at most.

I think it is a rising threat, and we’re already sort’ve at a point like it’s depicted in Cyberpunk 2077. In the future it may indeed make the internet an unfun place to be socially, but at least for now, the fediverse appears to holding it back so far. As I say, if it ever becomes overwhelmingly bots, I’m definitely going to be scaling back my participation, and if others do the same, then yes, the internet will suffer for it and be a far less useful resource, but at the same time, the bot resistant alternatives I mentioned in my other comment will benefit from that exodus, and we’ll likely just adapt to that.

I already answered the first part your question at the end of my previous comment. As to the idea that they become more useful/beneficial than actual human members, I personally find actually interacting with other humans more fulfilling than interacting with a machine in a social context, regardless of how ‘useful’ they are.

If AI gets to the point where it’s all pervasive, indistinguishable from real people, and we somehow cannot devise a way of weeding them out of online communities, I’d honestly probably just stop participating socially in public internet spaces, and instead restrict myself to private invite-only communities that do more intense vetting to ensure only humans are in that space, or participate in and help build up local mesh-networks, where people can actually meet up with who they talk to online.

That would probably mean a lot less time spent online overall, and instead going outside and finding connection with people in real life.

I didn’t and can’t guarantee that, I merely said that most bots reveal themselves with the technique I described.

I suspect that using human applications to get an AI through the door will be somewhat uncommon, as hiring people to do that for profit seeking reasons is likely not terribly viable, as a human can only write so many applications per day, and that labor isn’t free, I just don’t see the economics working out. Bot spam is likely only profitable when it is entirely automated.

But if a human specifically targeted an instance in that way, that certainly could happen. I suspect that at least for now, other users may be able to suss-out a bot that gets through, as they still have some tell-tale signs they give off in their writing style, but it’s plausible that at some point they will be able to blend in seamlessly. At that point, we’ll need to devise new ways to weed them out if they begin to take over.

It is correct, it is very frequently used in much of the material LLMs were trained on, and the AI is correctly using it, but generally to excess. It uses it so often, that it has unfortunately become a signal that something might be AI written. That is just the reality at this point, and I suspect Em-dash usage by humans will begin to fall off, at least online to avoid that association (until the AI is trained on material that makes it not use em-dashes, at least).

They are still quite evident in the way they construct their messages, and of course any em-dash usage is a big giveaway.

Someday they’ll likely be able to answer those questions more convincingly, but right now it works for the most part.

Having manual account approvals combined with a short questionnaire asking why they want to join and which communities interest them has been extremely effective on my instance so far, as most bots reveal themselves at this step.

Flohmarket is just the name of the software, which as another said, is the German word for flea market. I suspect the creator is German.

Anyone who self-hosts their own flohmarket instance can call their instance whatever they want.

Movim is a federated Discord alternative, though not part of the fediverse/Activitypub, as it is based on XMPP instead. It’s still a bit clunky in the UX department, but is currently the most full featured federated alternative.

Also @HubertManne@piefed.social

CoMaps (which uses openstreetmaps) has the option of adding a link to a menu for restaurants, though I don’t think it has reviews.

I believe Flohmarkt is a fediverse alternative.

Do be aware that I don’t think that blogs can be encrypted or made private, I think they’re viewable to any movim user (I haven’t experimented with that feature).

Also, it is possible to disable the chat encryption on Movim, so if you’re going to have any non-tech savvy people using it who may accidentally disable it without knowing, and that could be dangerous, then you may need to opt for a platform where it’s enabled by default instead, like Delta chat (though it does not have any blog-like features, multi-room channels, nor any voice call ability, unlike Movim.

Movim allows you to host a blog as well as private and encrypted chat channels like Matrix, that might be a good solution.

No. Use Nostr for that, since it’s already overrun by crypto-bros over there.

If you’d rather avoid registering, you could try Movim instead, which just needs a username and password to use, no email required during sign-up.

It’s open-source and GPL licensed. There are no restrictions if you self-host, the subscription only applies if you use an account on the main server, which pays for development and hosting costs of the main server.

Ah, my bad. Thanks for letting me know! Edited my other comment to reflect that.