It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Fediverse doesn't (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it's "self hosted" structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.

The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.

Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.

All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the "AI phrasing", if anyone catches it.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 hours ago

That's already happening. Bots are posting from open instances, and malicious instances are manipulating votes.

The best solution I see is allowlisting servers you want to federate with.