 Myth: The #Fediverse™ Is Decentralised™ I run my own #Mastodon instance just for myself. An instance of one. What does that mean on today’s fediverse? It means I’m on mastodon.social. What? That makes no sense! Let me explain: Since I have my own instance, surely I decide who I follow and anyone can follow me, right? Wrong. For ~1M accounts, Eugen decides. If he blocks my instance, a large number of people who follow me today will no longer be able to. So I may as well be on his server. 23 comments
I'm no expert but I think I see what you're getting at. Malevolent intentions will wreak havoc.  @aral this is what basically happened with XMPP. All big players joined, only to build walled gardens later and excluding anyone that had their smaller servers.  @fishidwardrobe @aral for me the point is to don't trust them, they are doing this only for their business, not for the people. @jsoriano @aral Don't trust who? Facebook? Sure? One of the hundred or so independent XMPP servers still running? Not so much. https://list.jabber.at/ @fishidwardrobe @aral yes Meta, or any other big player that expresses support for an open protocol.  @fishidwardrobe @jsoriano @aral > But hardly anyone uses it now. Absolutely false. That is a very common misconception that has me scratching my head on a regular basis. @walruslifestyle @jsoriano @aral That's lovely to know. I must just be having the worst luck with it then. There's one person I talk to on XMPP and once every six months whatever server I'm on shuts down and I have to pick a new one. I think we've given up and switched to email.  @walruslifestyle @jsoriano @aral This. The big players never took anyone away. They just temporarily added users who otherwise never would have bothered to set up XMPP. I suspect this won’t be much different, and also that we don’t have the power to stop it. Not without European regulatory oversight, anyways.  @aral I'd be keen to see the percentage of people I follow on a big instance , because I'm automatically wary of following anyone on them  OR they get blocked by the people.. i.e. reddit style.. i.e. NBGAF style.. END IT ! /// can happen again:  @aral I think a significant majority of people who joined mastosoc either didn't know or didn't care about the alternatives and joined because other people were there as well, even though the protocols of fediverse try to eliminate this issue. The users were used to it.
 They don’t even support linking in posts on Facebook. How is the same company supposed to be part of a distributed network?  > Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social Now you all know how small instances suffered when they were being blocked because their opinion differed than that of the admins of large instances and Y’all kept silent. Or when people used Fedi software created by someone they didn’t like, you were fedi blocked. Reminds me of that, “First they came…”  @aral so ? Life goes back to what it was before they came. They won’t break the existing network of instances. You might not be able to talk to people on meta if they ban you though. |
Gregory's Server
The same goes for other large servers.
Look at how many of the people you interact with are on the handful of the largest servers and imagine that just those handful of servers blocked your server.
Come, let‘s take this further…
Apparently Facebook/Meta is “joining” the fediverse. How nice of them. Now imagine that the largest instance is run by Zuckerberg. (Or <insert your favourite Silicon Valley billionaire here>.)
Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social…