this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Fediverse

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This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (39 children)

An excellent read. My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it, and that no matter what Meta, Reddit, Google, etc. would never want to see a decentralized platform succeed.

Pretty much the Fediverse needs to never let a big company tie into it. Our group needs to work at growing but at a sustainable rate.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (11 children)

We can't effectively block corporate injections, unfortunately. The admins of large hub instances are just of the opinion that bigger is better, and that more is more. They've been excited by the prospect of, I don't know, legitimacy or something, for a while now.

The result is going to be the network... not fracturing, per-se, but significantly restructuring itself. Big instances will get sucked into Big Social's halo, and be like the suburbs to Meta's or Tumblr's metropolitan centres. Smaller instances will end up as the exurbs. Content will flow quickly between metro and suburban spaces, and trickle across suburban spaces between the metro and exurban spaces. And which Fedivesre site you choose to use will end up mattering even more than it does now.

Right now, there's speculative reason to believe that Meta's offering up incentives to big instance admins. Those incentives will ultimately result in Meta owning them by proxy. They'll be client kingdoms, to mix metaphors, working on Meta's behalf, but getting relatively little in return for it.

I think Reddit moderators probably have a good idea about how they'll ultimately end up feeling.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly right. Human greed doesn’t only come from money.

  • “It will be free advertisement and will help the project grow!”
  • “Look how many people are using my server. MY server. I’m popular now!”
  • And the more obvious, “If I make my server big enough, maybe I can cash out by being bought by this big company!”

In the end and from whatever the source, that bus always ends up in the same place once they convince themselves to get on it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

They come with the gift of millions of new users, and all you have to give them is ownership of 95% of your users, forever.

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