this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Someone is really out to get lemmy.world lately.
I feel like with every update there is at least one attack.
We're having fun and trying to build a positive space. And we have real potential to succeed in growing large. Can you think of a single faster way to attract trolling on the internet?
It's a lot more likely than someone like spez taking a break from plundering his company to piss off a modest number of internet randos in some internet corner somewhere, which would barely be a drop in the bucket of his problem anyway.
The overall effect of this is so small, it almost has to be someone(s) with too much time on their hands. If they had any kind of real power, they wouldn't be wasting their time on these chump change attacks.
Honestly, decentralized social media are probably bad news for the current state of the art of disinformation campaigns. The bullshit that has been thriving on Facebook and Twitter is not only a chorus of bigoted aunts and uncles, but (perhaps more importantly) a coordinated attack from state sponsored troll farms seeking, among other things, to destabilise Western democracies.
The fediverse is, by design, less vulnerable to these attacks. Your trolls can generate activity around your disinformation content all they want: if nobody I follow boosts it, it's not going to show up in my Mastodon feed. And you can feel free to recreate r/conservative or whatever in the fediverse, but if it becomes a cesspool like on Reddit you'll be stuck with your trolls talking to each other on a defederated instance with no-one listening. Disinformation strategies currently employed successfully on centralized social media platforms are likely to fail here, causing a problem for bad actors.
It is probably paranoid to think there's any geopolitical actor behind the current attack, but I fully expect the fediverse to become under attack from Russian troll farms as soon as they realize they're no longer reaching out to people on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook.
I agree with this entirely.