While browsing the fediverse I come across more and more accounts that seem … a bit off, a little uncanny. The stuff they post seems random, their comments slightly weird. What’s going on, is the fediverse being overrun by bots? Or am I as a fanatic anti-AI person just losing my mind and seeing the enemy everywhere?
I hate the fact that I now question every interaction that seems a bit off - it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way - as a neurodivergent person I know how bad I would feel about being ostracized as ‘too strange to be real’. How would you handle this?
So-called “social” networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).
The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).
The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.
The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they’ll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It’s almost inevitable.
It’s also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there’s no general solution to that).
Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there’s not much that can be done from the service itself.
Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.
tl;dr: it’s not a technical problem, it’s a people problem. So it won’t be solved by technical solutions.