I don’t think it’s quite right to call this a “51% attack”. That applies more to cryptocurrency networks, or networks built on consensus.
If a single Lemmy instance gained 51% market share, they’d have almost as much to lose as the rest of the fediverse by defederating. There’s really no magic number here.
It’s also based more on communities than on users. It’s easy for a user to move. It’s very difficult for a whole community to move.
I think the most important thing in the fediverse is to actively encourage communities to distribute themselves somewhat evenly across instances. It won’t matter if Meta has 90% of users if those users are largely interacting with federated communities. Then if Meta pulled the plug, those users would be motivated to pick up and move to an instance that didn’t block their favorite communities.
It’s great, for example, that we have specialized instances like startrek.website. Ideally, everyone on Lemmy should be “invested” in multiple instances, to the point that federation is essential for the service to remain useful to them on an individual level.
I think the fediverse needs something akin to antitrust laws that encourage and perhaps even enforce competition. I’m not sure how this could actually work though.
Already, I think the largest Lemmy instances are big enough to threaten the health of the network. Shop local and support small instances!
I don’t get how once to federation starts those instances go extinct. They still federate with instances who federate with the corp but just not the corp.
I think we need a way to have lemmy handle “netsplits” more like IRC and less like “community went poof”. IDK if people are working on this (making the communities distributed), but I think there are existing technical solutions that can be leveraged if the devs don’t want to solve it themselves.
I’ve seen some active instances die due to admin neglect (not paying the bills, for instance), and I’ve wondered how those communities have fared since, since they’d have to start over elsewhere, and without all the content and history from their origin server. Same goes with user accounts too.
But while that’s a very lucky thing to have, the issue is that we depend on the owner of Mastodon to not sell the company to a billionaire.
We don’t depend on that. Buying Mastodon would get them the branding but not Mastodon itself. It’s all GPL/AGPL and would be forked immediately if sold. The buyer would have no control over it.
Oracle may have owned OpenOffice but it didn’t matter. Everyone uses LibreOffice now. Same shit.
Dont agree here, the mastodon.social already redirects users to make an account there. Even if its FOSS the company that represents it is very powerful. Think of android, technically FOSS but Google can control preety much all of its developments. No forks would be even be considered
First, Mastodon isn’t a platform, it’s a service. Unlike Mastodon, Android was always a bunch of proprietary stuff built onto an open source base. The Android license (Apache) is also a lot more permissive than Mastodon’s (GPL). Probably the most important thing here is that all derivative works must be licensed under the GPL, whereas Google can use AOSP code to build out proprietary features whenever they want.
Their ability to use the app to direct users to mastodon.social depends entirely on Mastodon’s good reputation. Destroying the reputation destroys the ability along with it. Mastodon is way bigger than just m.s, but a buyer wouldn’t control the instance in a meaningful enough sense. Users aren’t serfs and there would be a mass exodus if, say, Peter Thiel bought Mastodon. Some would stay, but the people who contribute probably 90% of the activity would be out the door. Very likely, users would be given time to migrate before the larger community defederated the instance en masse. Any effort to prevent users from leaving would just accelerate that process. They just have no real ability to compel people to behave the way they want.
To be fair, mastodon.social is Mastodon instance, and all Mastodon instances (that support signup at all) will show a Sign Up link for themselves. This is true from the biggest instances to the smallest ones.
But to bolster your point, the Mastodon app could push exclusively for signups on the newly acquired mastodon.social domain, and hide other options behind a dark pattern… Like how Element does this when you try to log in to a Matrix server.
Yeah sorry, meant https://joinmastodon.org instead of .social
The mistake is thinking everyone everywhere must be connected.
If 51% of people want to be on Facebook, or are so complacent and happy with their situation that they don’t feel like the corporate interests are screwing them then they are allowed to be there and be part of the majority.
I don’t want to be there and I won’t be, regardless. So at least 1 person will be there waiting on the Fediverse that we want where things are more distributed. I have a feeling that I am not alone and that the number of people like me out there is sufficient 5o guarantee that Facebook or any other corporate entity will not control the Fediverse.
This is true, but it doesn’t account for one of the major use cases of social media: connecting with specific people and groups you know IRL.
People are not fungible, and thus social networks are not fungible either. Social media lives and dies by the network effect.
This is less an issue for Lemmy as it is for Mastodon, I guess. But even so, Lemmy has yet to reach the point where you can find an active community on almost any niche subject, like you could on Reddit or Twitter. Hopefully we’ll reach that point eventually, and it would be a crying shame if it was then torn away by one dominant instance deciding to close up.
Maybe this is already a thing, but it seems like allowing communities to be migrated from instance to instance would be a great thing for avoiding takeovers.
Hopefully we’ll reach that point eventually, and it would be a crying shame if it was then torn away by one dominant instance deciding to close up.
i see a ton of activity in both the development arena(client apps/servers) and content generation across (bots) the verse. im not convinced it has enough momentum but it just feels soo close to sustainable. my corner of the verse seems a bit dependent on the lemmys, but i dont think its forever.
i dont see the doom and gloom others do with metas instance. i see it as an off-ramp… the network communication required for metas users to be able to leave that old place behind and still communicate with their old friends.
The other argument I’ve seen is technological … where the major corporation starts influencing the software to their advantage … over time enough software changes are made so that the ecosystem becomes dependent on those changes … developers keep getting nudged, encouraged or influenced to make changes or upgrades to accommodate corporates and their systems … then once enough changes have been implemented, the whole system becomes dominated and controlled by the corporates.
If they can’t achieve instant take over, they don’t mind playing the long game and slowly dissolving and eroding the fediverse over time.
Good writeup, but I don’t see the Fediverse as a single entity–if a single instance gets to 51%, and even 25% of the other instances fork and continue federating among themselves, then those 25% would function just as well, and likely maintain users with shared interests (i.e. how Lemmy is still interesting despite being much smaller than Reddit)
A “51% attack” isn’t really meaningful for something like the Fediverse because there’s no concept of any particular instance or group of instances being “authoritative.” There’s no special benefit to be had from owning a majority of the instances or users or whatever other metric you want to measure by.
If tomorrow Reddit were to magically federate, it would instantly have the majority of threaded conversation going on in the Fediverse under its control. If the day afterward it defederated again, it wouldn’t mean that it had somehow “become” the Fediverse and the rest of us were being shed like irrelevant detritus. It’s nothing at all like a cryptocurrency fork, where there’s a strong incentive to follow whatever the “majority” fork is doing because that’s where the money is.
