Why the Fediverse is not (yet) Billionaire-Proof, or: The 51% Attack for the Fediverse
Why the Fediverse is not (yet) Billionaire-Proof, or: The 51% Attack for the Fediverse
Definition: A single, abusive entity or a group of abusive entities in the Fediverse has gained so much influence, that they can pull EEE (embrace, extend and extinguish The attack will look like t…
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 https://joinmastodon.org/ 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
In economics, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products. Network effects are typically positive feedback systems, resulting in users deriving more and more value from a product as more users join the same network. The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users (total effect) and also the enhancement of other non-users' motivation for using the product (marginal effect).Network effects can be direct or indirect. Direct network effects arise when a given user's utility increases with the number of other users of the same product or technology, meaning that adoption of a product by different users is complementary. This effect is separate from effects related to price, such as a benefit to existing users resulting from price decreases as more users join. Direct network effects can be seen with social networking services, including Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and LinkedIn; telecommunications devices like the telephone; and instant messaging services such as MSN, AIM or QQ. Indirect (or cross-group) network effects arise when there are "at least two different customer groups that are interdependent, and the utility of at least one group grows as the other group(s) grow". For example, hardware may become more valuable to consumers with the growth of compatible software. Network effects are commonly mistaken for economies of scale, which describe decreasing average production costs in relation to the total volume of units produced. Economies of scale are a common phenomenon in traditional industries such as manufacturing, whereas network effects are most prevalent in new economy industries, particularly information and communication technologies. Network effects are the demand side counterpart of economies of scale, as they function by increasing a customer's willingness to pay due rather than decreasing the supplier's average cost.Upon reaching critical mass, a bandwagon effect can result. As the network continues to become more valuable with each new adopter, more people are incentivised to adopt, resulting in a positive feedback loop. Multiple equilibria and a market monopoly are two key potential outcomes in markets that exhibit network effects. Consumer expectations are key in determining which outcomes will result.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.
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!
In my opinion in internet only thing that really matters is to preserve information of all kinds, for example this article https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/14/23792586/classic-game-preservation-video-game-history-foundation-esa and this is not only video games, YouTube too, Reddit too, stack overflow too, and many many many more, what hurts the most is that enormous amount of information may disappear at any moment, it feels like burning of library of Alexandria, so much of history is just going poof and this is when we have such technologies as modern filesystems supporting block based dedication and transparent compression and such cheap giant vessels of info, for example 20tb hdd cost around 350usd while just 10 years ago it would cost few thousands, i think billionaires are way too short sighted to not trying to really preserve and recover all the info possible
Why think they don't? Amazon web service is, well, Amazon, so it's like a Bezos-funded library - if he or other execs wish so they can preserve whatever they wish for as long as they can afford electricity and maintenance. The same goes with google or facebook .. the real question is what will be chosen for preservation when inevitably the reaper comes for these corps in their current form.
As soon as money gets involved so does greed. And greed can destroy anything very very quickly.
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.
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.