this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Seems like just another reason why defederation should be completely removed from the protocol. It's way too easy to abuse and force centralisation.
There are other far less destructive and abusable ways of dealing with spam and content moderation.
I maintain that it's better to give the users the control, and allow them to decide which instances, communities, and users they want to be exposed to. Bottom up moderation, instead of top down.
For example, instances can provide suggested 'block' lists (much like how an ad blocker works) and users can decide whether or not to apply those lists at their own discretion.
By forcing federation, the network stays decentralized. Maintaining community blacklists that can be turned on or off by the individual user protects against heavy handed moderation and censorship, whilst also protecting users from being exposed to undesirable content.
The case with XMPP is that Google Talk introduced addons and intricacies that were unique to them. So they could federate with you in full with additional bells and whistles while you were stuck in an eternal catch-up. They presented a better alternative regardless of the eventual defederation. Even if we have some viral clauses as in GPL in open-source software that ensures protocol compatible software to be compliant, we can only do that to a certain extent plus enforcement is always an issue. Who are going to spend the vast sum of money in court to defend the "federation"?
This aside, enforcing federation alone does not ensure decentralization. These zero-marginal-cost fixed-cost-intensive businesses of the internet has a tendency to centralize as serving one more seat costs no penny plus one more seat diluates the fixed cost altogether.
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.
I may misunderstand how the fediverse and the software works but my understanding is content such as images gets copied over to federated servers and so it seems to me like the ability to defederate would be a requirement in order for servers to stay in compliance with the law and be able to limit various illegal and morally horrible materials from being copied onto their server and network.
Given that (unless I'm wrong about how this works or there's another way around it I'm not thinking of), at the end of the day is it really possible to not have the ability to defederate? There will be times when it would be needed it seems to me. Or for malicious bot servers, nazis, etc. — lots of potential reasons a full defederation would be desired or required.
That's actually not how it works. Images are hosted by the instance the community is on. Other instances embed those images as links in the page. The image is downloaded from the original instance by the browser.
The Beehaw devs are feeling the need to defederate right now due to that being the viable strategy for scaling their mod efforts. What would the solution be if they could not defederate?