this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
515 points (98.3% liked)

Fediverse

17693 readers
2 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
515
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
133 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Your points are valid, but that doesn't mean we should do nothing. Enforcing federation and using copyleft licensing are both strong defenses against centralization and network dominance by a well funded third party.

As far as GPL goes, from what I've seen, big tech companies tend to take it pretty seriously. There is no reason we shouldn't be using that, and other license protections if we have the option.

As for natural centralization over time, I think that is a far less urgent problem than the current risks we are facing, those being major network fragmentation due to the use of defederation, and the risk of centralization around a proprietary platform and/or instance.

Removal of defederation and strong copyleft licensing seem to be natural first steps in combatting that risk.