dedale

Where I live it's much more complete than google maps, especially in the countryside.

I don't see a scenario where google or the likes would be allowed to fail. So moot point.

Hypothetically it would open a window for open source services to sneak in.

Middle term? The phasing out of personal computers, and moving toward a system of servers/terminals where noone owns software.
You'll rent computing power or storage space, you'll only pay for the interface.

Hello. The post you mentioned was made as a warning, to prove a point. That the fediverse is currently extremely vulnerable to bots.

user 'alert', made the post then upvoted with his bots. To prove how easy it was to manipulate traffic, even without funding.

see:
https://kbin.social/m/lemmy@lemmy.ml/t/79888/Protect-Moderate-Purge-Your-Sever

It's proof that anyone could easily manipulate content unless instance owners take the bot issue seriously.

I'm still angry about it.

dude, it's important.

A few persons control a large amount of bots. They can manipulate upvotes, downvotes. Silence opinions they don't like, boost the ones they support. They can flood everyone's feed with whatever topic they like. They get to choose what is important, what people get to think about. They can harass any single user, by downvoting posts or being generally unpleasant all the time, and giving the impression that the community agrees. They can create a fake impression of consensus on any given topic.

Now that bots basically pass the Turing test, they can get you to almost never interact with a real person, but instead with machines who never actual learn, listen or change their mind. That sort of thing could erode anyone's opinion of their fellow humans. That could make one think that there's no possibility of common grounds with their adversaries.

Don't underestimate the bots, they're responsible for most of the political turmoil of the last decade.

I use it from time to time. The tech is getting better.
But it's very hard to find anything interesting on it.
They REALLY need to focus on implementing content filter and discovery tools.
Right now it's a lot noise and reposted videos. The search function doesn't work at all.

I think the platform could be viable with a decent, verbatim search function; a tag-based browsing system, and the ability to visualize the federated instances and browse any of them as local.

It's still possible to find interesting videos by browsing an instance focused on a specific interested as local.

I think it's a survival reflex. People pick up on popular trends, and follow them so they don't get lynched. It's hard to unlearn this kind of conditioning, even if you move to a relatively safe environment.