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How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But if Meta enters the space and siphons off a bunch of users, there's no reason the rest of us can't continue here as before, without it. It may be a relatively small community but it can still function.

It could lead to fracturing. If, for example, different forks of the software showed it with varying degrees of giving into Metas direction, that could fracture the community. Or simply the question of how to cope with the new imbalance.

You cant have a curve ball being thrown into traffic and expect your car comes out fine just because you are closing your eyes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But fracturing is not necessarily a death sentence. I don't necessarily want a billion users part of my echo chamber.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you actually read the article? That is literally how it first started for XMPP.

And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.

And once google separated completely,

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

The big difference is that the Fediverse, like Reddit and Digg before it, are not communication platforms between individual that know each other IRL.. They are content sharing and discussion platforms. The content that mainstream Meta or Twitter users are interested in and generating is largely not what I am interested in, so how is it a bad thing if most of them disappear from my platform?

Plenty of us have already gone through the most painful part of the transition and are now focused on building something new. If we can do that once, we can do it again, but it'll be even easier to divorce from Meta if I don't care about what I'm "losing" in the split.