this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.
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Not good. I can understand individual users or communities not wanting to be a part of the Fediverse or certain parts of it, but federation is a necessary condition for me to adopt a social media platform at this point.
For example, I've seen a few users discussing Kbin vs Lemmy. Now I prefer Lemmy, but I also want to see Kbin succeed. Despite that I think Lemmy is technically better, the fact that they use the same protocol means that we can talk to each other. We can agree to disagree in this new system.
We have seen what will happen if we allow social media to be owned by one company. Time and time again, the platform kills itself and those communities fragment. Sure Wikipedia is a company with a great deal of public trust, but so was Reddit. The issue is that the success of the system hinges on the benevolence of a single company or person. This is the main issue with centralized control in any instances: compromising the central controller kills the whole system.
If it gets popular, it's an indication that users have not learned that lesson, and eventually that platform will too "enshittify" itself into oblivion. Hopefully, they'll change course and federate.
I'm very new to the concept of fediverse, but can't the same thing happen to any Lemmy instance? Say for example Beehaw becomes the go to for a lot of popular topics and suddenly that admin decides to implement some assinine requirement to continue using it's instance and then just decides to nuke it following resistance from the community? A bit more extreme than the Reddit situation, but still curious.
Apparently you can make a blank comment with Lemmy. Fat-fingered the send button. Anyways...
That's one reason why we need not centralize on any one instance, so that the whole set of communities isn't lost if a big instance goes rogue. However, in the nightmare scenario where an instance goes rogue and it happens to contain huge communities, we can simply [1] pick up house and move somewhere else, specifically to a new instance, your own in the worst case.
It's not that we'll never lose communities or that the problem of power-tripping mods is completely solved. [2] It's that, because the system is distributed and decentralized by design, the whole system won't die if one big node goes down.
Eventually, all these instances are going to die because all things end. However, the Fediverse should be able to continue as long as users are interested in using the service.
The success of centralization as an organizational principle hinges on the success of its central hub. If that one hub is corrupted (and it will be), the whole system has to deal with the consequences. To recreate this situation on the decentralized system, you need to corrupt a large enough set of the entire network, which is possible but much harder to accomplish.
Additionally, I imagine that the Internet Archive or someone else will start archiving our content, although we shouldn't rely on that.
[1] The Reddit exodus so far has shown that transplanting an entire community, e.g. a subreddit, is not at all simple. However, it should be easier once people learn how to use a Threadiverse app, because Kbin and Lemmy are quite similar.
[2] The problem of "power-tripping mods" is really a special case of the problem of "power-tripping people" in social organization. In my view, anarchism and similar decentralized social movements have laid a ton of groundwork and theory for robust federated social systems that are not contingent on having perfect actors, although the problem is of course not fully solved.