Please, put the pitchforks and torches down. Hear me out.
You (yes, you!) are a front-runner. You are a first-mover. You came to the fediverse while most people don’t even know it’s a thing.
In the last couple of weeks/months, there’s been an increasing sentiment to boycott the established social media (Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, etc.), due to their rollback of fact-checking and hate speech protection. This has resulted in a lot of new users for a lot of instances lately.
Feddit.dk has gotten over 50 new users in the past few weeks, which is about a +50% increase of the monthly active users, a big deal for a small instance like ours.
This is a great opportunity to teach others about the fediverse and get more people to move to a more democratic, sustainable internet. But all these potential users are still on the corporate social media - we can’t reach them unless we are there!
You, the first-mover, is exactly the kind of person we need to stay on Facebook, just for a while, to guide people over to the fediverse. Feddit.dk was actually posted in a Facebook group a few weeks back and we got a few users that way! We’ve also gotten a lot of users via Reddit recently, as people on /r/Denmark have been mentioning Feddit.dk. Guiding people from corporate social media to the fediverse has been the most successful way to get more users so far.
We can’t get second-movers if the first-movers leave everyone behind. So maybe, consider not deleting your Facebook or Reddit account just yet, and if you don’t, try to look out for people that are looking for alternatives. You can be their guide.
(and if you want to delete Facebook regardless, I totally respect that choice btw)
Current platforms like Lemmy are NOT ready for massive amounts of users. They have very poor moderation controls, no effective strategy to combat bots, and no money to pay people for it.
The only reason Lemmy is usable right now is because it has nerdy people using it in good faith. If it were to gain critical mass it would collapse under the deluge of trolls and bots.
It’s a quaint little place, and I like it for being that.
I’m actually not sure how federated lemmy hasn’t already been destroyed. Wouldn’t it just take one bad actor to start spamming all the other instances with nonsence? If you deferate with the instance the bots are coming from they can just open another, right? Like a DDOS attack
In principle yes, one bad actor could start spamming a lot. But they usually get banned pretty quickly.
Well, you’d need a new domain so at least you’re forcing the spammer to spend money on a new domain, which probably breaks most of these attempts. Also if the spammers are really bad or posting illegal stuff and they’re registering domains, you could maybe report them to their domain registrar and possibly get them to shut them out or maybe even get law enforcement involved to figure out who registered the domains.
As a last resort, you could go to allowlist federation, where you are by default not federated with an unknown domain.
Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, many domains being required probably is annoying / prohibitive enough to stop distributed botnet attacks.
And it has enthusiasts running and moderating things that are just about able to keep up with the userbase.
It wouldn’t take much more to be overwhelming.