i’m doing it because I want to make the fediverse more friendly place, in hopes of making it more welcoming for new users, and the nicer place in general. But I wonder how much is just less bots.

  • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    They started inflating upvotes for sponsored content, about six years ago? It’s around when /popular/ became a thing. Posts with +1000 suddenly had +7000 or more.

    • Z4rK@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Could an instance on Lemmy go commercial and try to do something similar? Let’s say .world continues to outgrow the others and in a year or two it’s time for them to capitalize on their size.

      I guess at some point some instances will go “rogue” in one or more ways and it will be interesting challenges to the fediverse to deal with it.

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Honestly I have no idea! Can instances fake numbers like Reddit did? I mean, they could use a bunch of bit accounts to fake upvoting and downvoting I suppose, but it’s all public info here instead of all being hidden.

      • lemme_at_it@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lemmy is AGPL, https://snyk.io/learn/agpl-license/ ie CopyLeft. The code is always free to use, modify & distribute. While commercialisation is permitted, it is ‘harder’ to enshitify or rather pointless because the code & all the modifications you make fall under the free licence - so people can still leave your instance & replicate it in a heartbeat. It’s designed to allow commercialisation by community driven donations - rather than selling anything. If the instance-owner wanted to go fully commercial & protect their code which has modifications for “sponsored content” , they’d have to abandon Lemmy & write everything from scratch - or give all that code with their modifications to the community - making it all rather pointless.