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How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] 50 points 3 years ago (37 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.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    The thing is that Meta and Reddit are masters of social manipulation through their algorithms. They know what low common denominators get the most engagement. I blame FB for a big number of echo Chambers and that just fed people their own negativity right back, made them spiral into a bad place mentally.

    If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they'll do it all over again.

    It's the halcyon days of the Fediverse. Negativity on my feed is nonexistent. There's discussion. There's respect for differences. I know things will change with time but it's important that the big instances never work as proxies for big tech. It's important that big tech doesn't get a seat at the table. Voices should remain individual and not some mouthpiece to an industry that wants centralized control.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    "Negativity on my feed is nonexistent."

    Absolute first thing I noticed when I came in to test this as a Reddit alternative. It's so refreshing, and the discourse is so civil.

    If there's a way we can keep this quality, it'd be amazing. I often wondered when I'm on Reddit or twitter how much of the awful negativity is really people's or bots/algos prodding them into acting this way.

    If the current big players best bets are to weasel in on the large instances, are there any simple changes that could be done to prevent their take over or influence? Things that aren't too heavy handed?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Wdym there is so much negativity on Lemmy. It is everywhere i lok. Especially towards billionaire submarines, CEOs and corporations

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.

    They have that ability, and always will have. They can create as many accounts as they like on as many instances as they like, or run as many instances as they like themselves, use incentivized individuals, or employees, or bots, or any combination of all of the above. No one can stop them, maybe even no one can spot them.

    The only thing which is holding them back right now is lemmy/kbin still being too insignificant. If the network continues to grow, more and more big corps will see it as a market and an opportunity, and they will have plenty of ways to interact with it.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (20 children)

    @MyMulligan @jherazob I disagree.

    I think the key thing is to just make sure that you don't use non #FOSS clients. #GoogleTalk started as a client for #XMPP, people migrated to it, and then #Google dropped support for #XMPP. If so many people didn't use #GoogleTalk, the #XMPP network would have remained unimpeded.

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 3 years ago (15 children)

    At this point it wouldn't matter, all they need to do is to mess with the protocol and it'd achieve the same thing, Meta and everything in it's sphere would "work well", but connecting with true ActivityPub servers would work just glitchy enough to annoy their users and point the fingers towards our side, just like it happened with XMPP

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (14 children)

    @jherazob

    what the heck makes you think that all the #Fediverse users are just gonna leave for #Meta because federation with it is "annoying"? lol

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    I wasn't talking about our users, i was talking about theirs, a direct mirror of what the author described with XMPP

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    @jherazob The #Meta situation isn't comparable to the #XMPP situation though

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    Correct, it's worse, you can very much argue that Google had good faith intentions, you cannot even pretend that Facebook does while keeping a straight face

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (9 children)

    @jherazob I care more about the effects than intent in this case.

    #Meta's #Threads / #Barcelona / #Project92 doesn't have the ability to do anything actually negative to the #Fediverse except potentially overload small instances with a flood of traffic.

    I don't get the fearmongering; lots of talk about "breaking the #Fediverse" coming from people who aren't really doing a good job of articulating how exactly a new #Fediverse software--because that's all this is at the end of the day--will break an entire network of software that already works with each other.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    Example: Meta federates with lemmy. Lemmy is small so it gets more feature requests than it can code up. Meta comes in and looks at the most requested feature that’s been put on lemmy's backlog. Let’s say it’s some mod tool. Maybe even AI mod tool that sorts comments based on sentiment analysis. And they only implement that feature for Meta clients - not for lemmy. Suddenly mods have a choice - use lemmy and face flood of trolls in their communities or move to Meta and be able to properly moderate those troll waves. Some will stay, some will move. Another new cool feature for Meta, some will stay, some will move. Eventually most users will be on Meta client because it has all these useful features. OP's article describes the rest.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (6 children)

    @Hexorg

    > Lemmy is small so it gets more feature requests than it can code up.

    Why? From who? Are a lot of #Meta users who are on #Project92 / #Barcelona / #Threads *really* going to be submitting feature requests for a software that they don't use?

    > Meta comes in and looks at the most requested feature that’s been put on lemmy's backlog. Let’s say it’s some mod tool. Maybe even AI mod tool that sorts comments based on sentiment analysis.

    What are the chances that this is something so significant that people would be willing to switch software over it?

    > use lemmy and face flood of trolls in their communities

    Where are these users coming from? This is already a problem on the #Fediverse, and we already know how to deal with it.

    This scenario you're pitching seems wildly implausible.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Why? From Who?

    From everyone like right now where there’s a bunch of bugs and wants to have certain tools for moderation. Just look at how many issues have been added to lemmy in the past 3 weeks. And that’s just a fraction of Reddit users joining. Having millions of Facebook users being able to interact with lemmy will likely expose many more bugs and show the need for more moderation.

    Same applies to your question about the troll wave - they are currently coming from Reddit. And once Meta joins - more fediverse exposure will let more people know of fediverse, and those new people will have trolls among them.

    What are the chances that this is something so significant that people would be willing to switch software over it?

    Meta has been in the market of attracting people for a long time. Don’t underestimate their R&D . People on Reddit used to join subs just for having certain bots. Meta can easily bring a ChatGPT bot to lemmy for example. Again this might not attract you but you have to think about the average person.

    I think your one good argument against my scenario is defederation. Unlike XMPP the fediverse is already gaining critical mass where defederation can be a viable option. But again I’m sure Meta R&D can “help” with it

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

    @Hexorg Hmm IDK. I disagree on moderation, I don't think any #Fediverse admin would trust #Meta enough to use their software for moderation.

    The only case I could see for something similar happening is if #Meta forked existing software, added features people wanted, and then closed the source; but admins won't take kindly to that either.

    Now, maybe if people start moving away from #Meta's #Project92 / #Barcelona / #Threads, then those reports will start to pile up, but that's a net negative for #FaceBook in terms of userbase, not a net positive.

    If I was #Meta, I wouldn't be making server software, I'd be making a custom client with embedded ads to monetize the content from other folks' content. Which could actually lead to an "embrace, extend, extinguish" situation, much more likely than what #Meta is doing right now.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Well ok we don’t know what’s actually happening and our mental models of people and companies differ ever so slightly. Not enough to discern on itself but enough that in this scenario the differences compound and we arrive to different conclusions. The reality is probably going to be somewhere in the middle of our scenarios. I do however think that the fediverse should err on the side of Meta being very dangerous because the alternative will catch us without options.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    @Hexorg I agree, to a degree. Generally I support federation without cooperation, if that makes sense. The sole purpose of federating with #Meta should be to get people to leave #Meta.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I disagree on moderation, I don’t think any #Fediverse admin would trust #Meta enough to use their software for moderation.

    I found the example interesting in principle. We can think of varieties besides moderation. What other features are highly requested and sought after?

    What about an easy way to find, join, and engage with even niche communities? Comm lookup and joining is wonky, especially when coming from small instances. Another related feature is user-side grouping of similar comms into one multi-community. Or being able to easily move between instances, relocate your account. Better indexing for web searches.

    The list of possible features, ranging from QoL to Enablers, is endless. Big companies with coding experience can easily dominate the scene, and make it hard to not join them or use their service. Their mere presence could spell dependence.

    Like I heard we're using lemmy 0.18 now. Would you voluntarily still use an older version, like 0.9, when you can just as well use 0.18?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    Exactly! Let them join…and be ignored.

    But how do we ignore them? Can you block an entire instance?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    The only official way is for the admin of your instance to defederate from the instance you want blocked, but that affects every registered user on your instance, even if they're against the action.

    I just released a user script that lets you block instances yourself on the client-side as a regular user - basically just removes post and comments from the HTML if they match your block list.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Yes. A lot of that is going on with instances being blocked en masse for allowing too many spam/bot accounts without any corresponding high quality activity coming from users registered with that instance. It's very much in flux right now, with instance administrators trying to figure out which metrics to use and what lists to trust, but I imagine a more mature/robust process will be used by most serious instances soon enough.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Let them join…and be ignored.

    I see the threat in the sheer developing power of these giants, making all the shiny tools people were wanting, making their service too attractive to be ignored.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.

    Google doesn't have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.

    The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple's chat app could only do SMS.

    I guess what I'm saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago*

    The threat right now is from Meta, that is eyeing the fediverse, not Google.

    For anyone paying attention, I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but it bears repeating: business models that treat the user as the product--to be sold, not catered to--is a cancer on the internet.

    This ought to be a wakeup call in 2023. If you aren't the paying customer/supporter, you are less than dirt on the underside of the boot of the big tech firms. You are cattle, in a factory farm, to be treated like shit, only to be slaughtered for profit at the next opportunity.

    Attitude's like "I don't care about ads" and "my data is worthless to me, so why not trade it in" all mask the more fundamental problem that is that you are being held in a cage full of shit, when in reality you could be roaming free in a pasture.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Given growth, it’s pretty much inevitable that certain instances will need funding to survive.

    Besides donation drives like Wikipedia, I can definitely see a world where small governments get involved.

    Places like Estonia, Israel and Iceland that want to cheaply promote their tech industries and cultural content. Things these countries are doing in centralized spaces like Facebook - but now with more control.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it.

    I'm not so sure. Facebook has an onion version that runs on the tor network. Big tech dominates the clear web but there's plenty of room for everyone else.

    Ultimately you have user types. In a few more months, LemmyVerse could have a couple of million active users.

    I'd bet the vast majority would scoff at a fediverse version of Facebook. It's just a different crowd - not unlike the tor network where Facebook (probably, maybe?) exists in nmae only.

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