@Hypolite Petovan
@VegOS
@Kristian

Is this person even real? If so, is this their account or has it been created by someone else or a bot (without their consent)? If so is there content feed being created by a chatBOT or not? If not then are all the replies to this thread created by content bots or not? If the content is created by comment bots what is the bot maker's intent?

Question 1 may be verifiable. Question 2 maybe not. Question 3 they may actively lie to you. Question 4 who knows. Question 5 falls into the realm of speculation of a psychological manipulator.

Given that I've replied to this thread, does that mean that every chatbot in the thread now sees that I'm a dupe that took the bait? Does this mean that I'm added to the "mark" category and more such stupidity will be in the global feed. View my comment here (https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1663-be04-01a0-62c688308763) and view all the rest of the comments in the thread (https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109667481087367875). Is no one responding because I'm being a dick, or are all of these comments one line hot takes from bots attempting to upvote someone on PBS who wants people to watch her show and get her post and her pretty face in as many global feeds as possible?

Grandma sitting at home thinks this woman is popular on the internet and will watch her show. Idiots with guns will think that their chosen shiboleth is popular on the internet with "cool" reactionary fascists. Everyone else will tune out and realize the game is rigged - that's not good when you're all out here trying to "remake" the internet. The machine the stupid monkeys that discovered fire decided to hook their entire culture to.

And this is an easy example. Shit, for all I know this woman's trying to prove a point by being this transparent. I've speculated above that the way that bots interact with posts downstream from me can manipulate the social graph of k-means clustered social interactions, but I'd have to dive into the Activity Pub protocol to see how they're doing this or the number of bots required.

This isn't a "pretend" problem. This is a "there is no way to tell information from disinformation" problem. The Kremlin no longer has to pay some group of underpaid interns in Latvia to pretend to be angry Americans, now you can automate the invective.

This is serious. People act in real life based on what they read and how they interact with the internet. Many people change their behaviors just slightly enough that in the aggregate it can sway elections, cause products to be bought, or wars to be fought. If you think you're immune, boy, have I got news for you.

If you're bots, I don't particularly care. I'm writing this in large part as a record of rhetoric that I can use for myself later, much like an interactive diary. What you're building has no safeguards for how *people* work and it's going to cause a total shitstorm when it breaks.

@Kristian
@Georg aus Bakum

So first - I wrote a little on this https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1663-c059-893e-32a454888815. In essence, in order for the internet to work there must be a way to pass messages remotely, there must be a way to confirm that the person on the other end of the message is a human being, and this way must be robust (that is, we must know believe that there isn't a chat bot in the future that would become sufficiently powerful that our verification method is broken).

This goes beyond SHA encryption. Public/private key encryption only works if we believe that two people can share a private key - that is, that I trust that the sender is human.

I think that there is a secondary problem, in that the way that Mastadon is created is such that this problem is magnified. Not only do I have to be able to trust that you are human, but I have to trust that the people that you trust, that could be on other servers that have different following regimes that I may not understand, are also human. And I don't trust that. In fact, I believe (from experience) that the entire Pleroma following regime is incredibly bad. So if you have friends, who have friends, who are on Pleroma I now have to wonder how my global feed will be affected if I connect with you, if I have any interest in using the global feed whatsoever.

As for the first problem, I don't see a solution. I think that the only way that anyone will ever be able to ensure that two parties are human beings will be meeting in person and physically exchanging private keys. Everything else has now been compromised.

Also here's a fun one I found - suppose you want to jerk off to porn you find on the "fediverse". But you don't want the people you follow to be able to see that you jerk off to porn (or which porn). Enter https://mastinator.com/! Now you can anonymously follow anyone, even if they've previously blocked you. And because the "fediverse" is accept all/block offending in it's connection policy regime, as soon as https://mastinator.com/ is blocked https://mastinator2.com/ will be made! Which opens a new can of worms - if Activity Pub takes over the internet will that be the end of viewing the internet anonymously? If I can only see content from people I follow and vice versa, how am I able to view subversive content? In other words, how am I able to connect to Grandma, my employer, my friends, and my lover/relationship without them all interacting without having half a dozen accounts. And if I *do* have half a dozen accounts how would anyone believe that anything anyone has to say is sincere or meaningful? It's all of the downsides of a panopticon with none of the benefits of anonymity.