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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] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If the Fediverse takes off, it would be fair to expect that new mega corps would arise out of that success. At one point, Reddit was a scrappy startup. Before that, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft were small companies that were going to change the world. Who knows which high user, high uptime instances will end up requiring full time staff, or which software tools will be used for interfacing with the Fediverse (or analyzing stats within the Fediverse), or otherwise make a profit out of all the activity that would be going on here?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, and if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation. At that point, only the big players with big money will be able to run sites in the Fediverse and it could end up mirroring what has happened to the rest of the internet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation cheaply

I think that' where the biggest threat lies. How is a small operator going to keep up with the demands of a corporate server cluster with millions of users. A small operator would have to defederate. That puts us back to the crux of the original question, should corpos be allowed on the Fediverse. Why not save everyone the circle jerk and blacklist them from the start.

A secondary threat is corporate sabotage of the ActivityPub protocol. They already have a track record of doing that to free and open standards.