niartenyaw

yeah, I had a similar thought about curators, but in my mind, if the curators own a single self-contained platform, they will inevitably become corrupt. so if that's true, let there be many instances and individuals can choose what to trust.

I think a platform like this would be very different from lemmy or something because instances/communities/whatever would be internally incentivized to keep the quality of reviews high for their own sake (which others could benefit from too). maybe that manifests as heavily controlling sign ups or new members are able to post reviews but need to be approved in some way to have their reviews included in the overall instance stats. just spit balling, but I think mechanics that assist that will be very important.

being open source does guard the code, but I think the far more important part is the running platform and its data. I imagine any platform like this will want to own all of its data, so anyone setting up a new deploy would completely start from scratch. if nothing else, people would have to recreate their accounts and attempt to recreate their data. and if past attempts to get people to switch platforms is any indication, I think that would be very difficult.

these are pretty interesting! I don't really like that the infra/data is centralized. always leaves room for bad actors to come along, whether they buy out the project or manipulate reviews.

would be cool if there are any projects out there that are doing something federated so you can choose which sets of review data you want to trust, I wonder if it's possible to extend or plugin to ActivityPub.

companies are capable of operating under different rules in different jurisdictions, they do it all the time. just look at how they handle data in EU due to GDPR vs how they do it everywhere else. I don't see why this case would be much different.

ok but I'm not in the EU nor is my instance so that doesn't really apply to me.

yeah, I see them being posted into their DB (and therefore federated as) a post as if they are a user. they can earmark that post as an ad and properly present it as such in their own platform but anyone federated would see the post as-is.

they could either obfuscate how they mark it as an ad or just not provide that information at all to federating instances.

then I can totally see them claiming they don't control other instances and can't be responsible for whether or not the federated ads are presented as such.

they technically could do this by representing ads with posts.

I think you're still right though. regardless of the situation with HP, he still created a company that, when sold, made him a billionaire. I don't think that is possible without also exploiting people.

relevant Dr. Fatima

ribbed for his pleasure