this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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There’s a lot of evidence to be worried about this.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I've seen that article and no, we still don't need to be worried. Just defederate and that's all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:
Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we're golden.
Everybody relax.
One important key lesson that everyone misses is funding ... we have to normalize paying a bit of money through donations or subscriptions to those people that maintain instances and those people who maintain, update and build the software ... if we all just keep tell ourselves that we all just keep our heads down, lock the door and don't bother to pay anyone to keep the door locked ... the same problems of the past will always emerge .... Owners, developers, programmers, instance maintainers just running out of money and enthusiasm because they have the shoulder the financial costs while everyone ignores them and takes everything for granted.
If we all just keep expecting volunteers to keep everything running for us for free ... eventually we will run out of willing volunteers as the community grows and the costs add up over time as instances grow more popular
SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE ... whatever platform it is and whatever amount of money you can give ... even if it means we just give a dollar a day, across hundreds or thousands of user, it will protect your instance owner, and ensure that the people running your instance never run into a situation where they have to decide on either ending their work ... or selling everything they have to make a bit of money back.
Couldn't agree more! I think that message might deserve it's own post but you did a great little write up here on the importance of supporting your instance!
good point
The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to "destroy" the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that "everyone" will be here, and it'll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don't think they're actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don't even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: "It feels like what X used to feel like". And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren't pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
This might all be true, but personally I don't care about Twitter or any alternative version of "microblogging". That's not the kind of content or engagement that I am looking for.
If Mastodon and other instances like it throughout the Fediverse are taking the majority of Meta's attention, even better. Let them be the army at the Black Gate distracting the Eye from two little hobbits approaching Mt Doom. Totally fine with me!
That is very shortsighted. Just because "its twitter and microblogging" doesn't mean it doesn't affect someone on lemmy that doesn't have it - people from mastodon can still read and reply to your comments there. Furthermore you yourself are on kbin that has an even larger integration with mastodon and other microblogging platforms, magazines themselves can be configured with specific tags so you get automatic engagement from other parts of the fediverse that aren't on either lemmy or kbin.
And this is just ignoring the simple basic truth that it still affects other people that you are interacting with. Just because you don't care doesn't mean others don't care, and if they leave, or want federation, or switch platforms, it affects your feed too.
Thank you for writing multiple paragraphs explaining that you don't care about this topic that you voluntarily clicked on, read, and engaged with.
The issue is that the fediverse is not going to present a unified front at this rate, it is already split over whether to defederate meta or not. We don't know whether the administrators of largest instances that joined the NDA talks with meta are going to defederate too.
I agree there's no reason to panic, but that doesn't mean that nothing should be done. The anti-meta-federation act or however it is called is a good step to get the community on board, as well as sharing articles like these and informing people about what is coming.
Some of the largest server admins are actively excited about Meta showing up, so yeah, we shouldn't expect them to defederate. I wouldn't expect them to federated even after it becomes clear that it was a bad idea. I think you'll see those particular instances close, or be handed off to new admins, of even be sold before you'll see them defederate, because people don't like to eat crow.
Yeah, it is very possible for us to not let Meta win. Acting like the Fediverse is doomed isn't productive at all.
It's not even that, just change your perspective so whatever Meta is doing or not doing is irrelevant. They can't "win" if we are on a different field playing the same sport with different players and our own equipment. Even if they have better equipment and 40,000 fans to our 1,500 that doesn't mean our thing isn't happening and meeting our needs.
I'd say it's exactly as productive as saying "It's no big deal if Meta joins the fediverse, It'll be fiiiiiine".
We should watch everything very carefully.
Explain how they would impact our communities if we defederate their instances from ours.
Spoiler: They can't.
There is zero reason to freak out. If you don't want to be affected by Meta then don't join an instance that federates with them. Boom. You're done. Problem solved. That's the beauty of the fediverse choose your flavor.
They are going to have more users, that's just a fact. They already have more users than us, but we still have these healthy and active communities. They could have 30 billion more users and we still don't lose as long as we have the communities we've built on our own instances.
Edit: Why are all these doomer accounts from kbin.social? Open registration is a mistake.
Seems like you haven't read that article at all, otherwise you'd understand this already happened multiple times.
"Explain how Google would impact XMPP servers if they defederate from Google Talk"
Spoiler: They can
It only doesn't matter if the majority of us are conscious of it and want to stop it. We need to place sanctions in a true democracy, that's not easy and it requires everybody be educated.
We're lucky that we're still in the tail end of the early adopters phase so most people in the fediverse will be open to gaining education. Also both sides of the heavily populated fediverse (Lemmy and mastodon)* feel recently betrayed by corporate greed.
All to say, it won't be a big deal as long as most people know what's going on. (I didn't before reading this.)
*Not sure where to put kbin
I just read this article and what Meta is doing then triggered all the alarm bells!
From the Wiki (quite enlightening):
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concern but the take over and extinguish takes a true majority adoption and in this age we get more fragmentation than we really see true consolidation. Not that it can’t happen. But possible vs probable and all that.
IIRC they had to be sued by the US federal government and Sun (over IE and Java, respectively) to back off. Which is not going to happen for the Fediverse. And it's not going to happen again in today's day and age period.
To wit, remember when Google took over the web and now defines the browser standard on both mobile and PC and nobody can do anything about it?
This is a great read, I'll definitely bookmark this for when someone says it won't be problem.