Well, as we all know, AI has gotten very smart to the point captcha’s are useless, and it can engage in social forums disguised as a human

But for the time being, it is also too expensive to turn into a full-on spam bot.

With Reddit turning into propaganda central anda greedy CEO that has the motive to sell Reddit data to AI farms, I worry that the AI will be able to be prompted to target websites such as the websites in the fediverse.

Nah, they’re not going to. They have nothing to gain from that, and the Fediverse/Lemmy isn’t as much as a blip on their radar. Optimistically, so far, we might have ~1% of the active base, maybe even fewer. The whole protests, which basically took over the entire site, only caused a 6.6% reduction in traffic, and only a small proportion would go to, and stay on other Fediverse sites like Lemmy, or Kbin.

Reddit likes to think that it can sell the data to the AI sites, but I question how many of them are actually buying it. Similarly for the API. Most of them are likely just going to take from Reddit archives that already exist (since it’s neatly packaged up for them), or just scrape the site directly. The API limits are a bit too unwieldy/cumbersome for them, and having to accommodate the API would be a change in workflow.

Reddit data is also a bit junky anyway. How many of them are useless in-jokes, or people summoning other bots? That’s extra data that won’t help if you’re trying to train a language model on Reddit, and is more likely to hurt than not.

How will the fediverse protect its self from these hypothetical bot armies?

Realistically, it can’t, not with the current array of tools available. The current mod tools are too limited to deal with things like a spambot attack, never mind things like the possibility of spam instances being spun up to flood the network.

Defederation doesn’t mean much if the spammers can just spin up a new instance and continue barely hindered, and it seems to be the only tool that instances have to deal with things like that.

Do you think Reddit/big companies will make attacks on the fediverse?

No. They’re more likely to use it (it costs less), or just ignore it entirely. The amount of users that moved over from the Reddit protests, while enormous for Lemmy itself, is barely a blip on Reddit’s radar. The actual protests during the most active part of the lockdown accounted for a 6.6% drop in Reddit traffic, which is miniscule, and a much smaller proportion of those people will have joined Fediverse alternatives of their subs.

Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?

Ad Revenue isn’t the only reason for clickbait to exist, but yes, I don’t doubt that we’ll see it happen sooner or later. It’ll mostly be the Reddit kind, where it’ll try to farm votes, since click-throughs don’t matter on Lemmy or Kbin, and it’s things like votes and boosts that will.

What are your thoughts and insights on this new “internet 2.0”?

I like the integration with places like Mastodon, and it would be nice to extend that out all the way, but at the same time, it is clearly still in heavy development. If we got hit with a spam wave at the moment, we would struggle to do anything about that, same for spam instances, and all of that.

The Lemmy interface is a bit glitchy, and there’s not much by way of apps, which was one of the draws for people to go on social media on their phone in the first place.

There’s a few features that would be nice to have, but aren’t implemented yet, like being able to move accounts to other instance without having to recreate them, or just having one single account for all instances, like how Hubzilla has their “nomadic identity”.