How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.
Maybe I'm bitter, and I know a lot of people wouldn't agree with this, but honestly? I think the non-corporate part of the Fediverse should just assume malice from the get go and preemptively defederate from whatever Meta put out. That way nothing's changed - Meta would essentially have a private / proprietary / isolated network, as far as users are concerned (much like Facebook already is), and even if the Fediverse will see less growth in the short term because of that, there will be no confusion on where everybody stands.
E: Well, thankfully and as expected, I'm not the only one to think this way: FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta’s ActivityPub Platform
Great fucking article. Nice look into the history of proprietary software. This part stuck out to me:
But there’s one thing my own experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers.
We need to convince instance owners not to federate with Meta. History tends to repeat itself and I'd rather not see this nice little corner of the internet die.
I sure hope that Meta doesn't try to integrate ActivityPub into their apps. As a user that feels like they finally found their home (Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy/kbin), please, go away Meta. lol
Amen. When people talk about how Reddit or Twitter will always be bigger, I say, "Let them be bigger." What we have out here is fantastic just the way it is. In a global world, "small" is still millions of people.
I remember google also sabotaging firefox by introducing subtle bugs which breaks google sites on firefox but works perfectly on chrome.
Do no evil
What a joke
I'm still angry about it.
Some features around uploading/managine files between google classroom and google drive is broken in Firefox, LibreWolf. But I suspect it's due to the disabling of 3rd party cookies, because it's also broken on ungoogled-chromium.
Photo loading in google maps is also broken.
The biggest issue is who pays for the server infrastructure at scale.
This made me wonder - what happens if my chosen Lemmy server goes down? Do I lose my account?
Hopefully, some kind of account portability is possible or in consideration. Even if it's a manual download of settings and subscriptions that could easily be uploaded to another instance.
I had to reinstall my local instance, and wasn't able to import my old database. That meant I had to go re-subscribe to everything and even worse, nothing on my account will actually federate. Comments I make on the "main" admin account won't federate anywhere, because the instances see that "old" user with the same name, but exchange is different.
So I had to create this second account, and use this to comment on things with. It's a pain, but hopefully it gets better. Even if it's just being able to export my subscriptions so I don't have to try to find them all again.
The Fediverse seems like a good place to implement a distributed, block chain based peering setup. Join a community and share the hosting
That's not going to work for web hosting. The only reason it works for crypto or folding is because each request takes minutes to run and there's no time dependence on returning the result. Additionally, they don't need much data and all data needed is dispersed with the task.
Websites are completely different. Each individual request is tiny, taking milliseconds to process. Each request is very time dependant, you have a person literally waiting for the result. But the biggest issue is that what people really want is stuff from a database. So that database would need up grant full access to everyone, meaning anyone could change whatever they wanted. Lastly, that database would need to be hosted anyway so you've gained nothing.
Don't suggest tech solutions when you don't have any idea what the problem or solution actually involves.
At a simple level- a lot of that happens already.
Moving around between communities is quite seamless, even though most of them are hosted on different servers, and even different parts of the world.
We just need Wikipedia style funding. If the server publishes their costs and fundraises, then people can support it directly. Instead of the stick and carrot of subscriptions or the rat race of ads, just be open and honest about server needs. If the users aren't able to raise funds, then cut back to what's affordable. Users will either deal with the reduced server capacity or they'll need to pay up to continue enjoying it. This doesn't need to be a free ride, but I trust the community will rally for a good service.
A lot of server owners do this already. The instance I'm on for example does this and also disclosed that they would donate any "proceeds" to the development of Lemmy. So they are only paying for upkeep costs.
The counter is that there are federation costs too. For relatively balanced nodes that should not matter. But if you are a small instance with a lot of popular communities it might be a problem. Plus you will never get a large fraction of people contributing. So those that can will need to remember to give a solid contribution.
The Fediverse is bound to come to the attention of big corporations, and if it becomes big enough they will view it as competition and try to crush it. I doubt it can outcompete them in terms of popularity. The best hope has to be coexistence, in which the Fediverse doesn't try to win the most users, but defends its integrity against large corporations entering the space to sabotage it.
The comparison with XMPP may not be conclusive: XMPP is purely a communication protocol, so if not many people use it, not many people can be reached through it and it becomes less useful. Something like Lemmy, by contrast, is not intended to get you in touch with everyone in the world. It can function as long as it has enough users to make it interesting, enough money to pay for servers, and enough skilled developers willing to work on it. It doesn't need huge numbers of users, and it doesn't need to outcompete Reddit or any other corporate platform.
I hope Lemmy can equip itself with good tools for managing trolls and other kinds of attack, including corporate-led sabotage, because those things are likely to come soon. There has been an explosion in bot accounts recently, which are ominously dormant for the time being. If those all get switched on at once, there will be a huge amount of noise and a big increase in traffic. Lemmy needs to prioritize equipping itself to withstand this.
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.
there's no reason the rest of us can't continue here as before, without it.
That's OP's point. They won't just siphon users. They will profit off of our content, while providing nothing in return, and intentionally breaking things to ensure the network never grows larger than a certain amount.
Offers for help should be treated the same as offers from a country you are actively at war with. No instances should federate with any Meta own/operated/controlled system. To do otherwise is suicide for the fediverse.
We should also avoid building on technologies they control. Even if OSS, they can knowingly introduce bugs in updates that only break fediverse tech and not meta tech. Which is exactly what the examples in the posted article did. Microsoft did exactly this, to ensure dominance in document file formats.
It seems really stupid from our perspective. Maliciously petty, but our paychecks don't depend on the success of the fediverse, while theirs does depend on it's failure.
These are not compatible communities, due to the owners of one.
I think the best outcome is for Fediverse to succeed at proving the model is better for users than mega corps. Then grow and last long enough until the EU takes notice, such that if any bad actors try to ruin it they'd want to protect it. We're probably talking far into the future, but I think if handled well it can get to that point.
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?
I wouldn’t assume the EU would necessarily be interested in protecting the Fediverse. Legislation like the GDPR is very much oriented towards working with corporate entities and the open Fediverse model is generally at odds with the right to be forgotten (since it’s effectively impossible to ensure all copies of a user’s data are deleted - I don’t even think it’s possible to determine which nodes may have a copy of a year old post).
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.
That should be in the FAQ
But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
This above is, I think, a very important attitude that is all too often thrown aside in the search for success. So many have dreamed of the "year of the Linux desktop," but I have never shared that desire; and it is largely for fear of what is being referenced above. I like those peculiar freedoms of Linux and other open source software projects. If it, or other such projects, were to take a truly significant market share I feel it would almost certainly start becoming what it opposed. I want the freedom and the honesty of such projects to remain, even if (possibly because?) they are somewhat niche, geeky and not entirely newbie friendly.
It baffles me that so many don't see it for what it is.
Meta contacts their competitor, and says that they want to build a competing product, and want us as competitor to help them with that. How can you possibly fall for that. Meta can already use activitypub for whatever they are building without any need to contact anyone from the Fediverse. The only possible reason they contact instance admins is because Meta wants to dictate the terms on how to Fediverse operates.
I've never really understood the EEE argument here. XMPP was an open proptocol, Google embraced it and attracted users, then extended it and took those users away. But according to this article, Google didn't extinguish XMPP. It's still around and serving its niche community.
That's already the situation the fediverse is in. This is a niche community and there are already existing social media companies that the majority of internet users are on. If Facebook joins the fediverse, it brings billions of new users to the fediverse. If they then leave the fediverse, ActivityPub will still be here and all of us on the real fediverse will still be here, in a niche community. Everyone here has already chosen the fediverse despite it being a clunky, unpolished, niche network. How is EEE a relevant fear for the fediverse?
It's in the article but to paraphrase it:
When a large company takes an open protocol, embraces it using adding users to the network through heir platform, then extends it using proprietary means, they have full control over how the protocol runs in the network.
When the open standards are forced to make changes to be functional with the dominant proprietary app that is poorly (and sometimes incorrectly) documented, open source groups are constantly on the backfoot in order to maintain compatibility, and that makes it harder to compete on their own right.
A second example given is LibreOffice, whose documents are made to fit the XML standard by Microsoft, but there are quirks in their documented standard that if you follow it too closely it isn't formatted quite the same as the document produced in Microsoft Office, so they were pressured to effectively copy MS and deviate from the standards MS claims to follow.
Well, isn't that sort of mentioned in the article?
If fediverse development slows down e.g. because adoption of inofficial Facebook extensions takes time it will harm the whole platform. Not by directly taking away users but by blocking progress.
I don't think the Fediverse is small enough for this to be a serious concern. Especially once multiple companies (Tumblr?) are invested in the fediverse I don't see this happening anymore.
Well, isn’t that sort of mentioned in the article?
It was the expressed purpose of the article. I don't know what they're on about. Maybe they didn't read it or just skimmed it.
I'm usually one who doesn't buy into conspiracy theories; however, at this point I believe the Reddit protests actually (I hate this meme) broke the internet.
Reddit was the "idiot cousin that causes minimum annoyance occasionally, that hasn't really hurt the advertising line much" for so long, that they all became dependent on the free, moderated, and literal fact checked by people it effects data for so long. That now, after the last weeks, of all the deleting, rewriting, restoring, rewriting, restoring, and rewriting again that all their cached data, and reddits "current" data is now worthless.
The super funny thing is, all the AI's are still pulling data from reddit, they are going to have to cull and sanitize all data and every connection to it, and can also never trust it again... Because many many many people actually care about being part of a community, and will continue to modify/poison their previous comments to keep corps and their mindless "AI" from their "OWNED CONTENT."
Yes I read that and explained why I don't think its relevant. Facebook can't slow down progress on the fediverse because:
Should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants this to succeed. I hope we don't make the same mistakes as doomed so many other open source open protocol projects in the past.
The solution is to simply ignore the corpos
The solution is to simply ignore the corpos
I envision- its not that simple.
They will likely offer the one thing we are missing here-
Ease of use, for normal people. Ie, your grandma using her facebook app, can interact with you via the fediverse.
That being said- most of us will know, the temporary boost to the fediverse will not be worth the long-term consequences. But- to your average user, they will love this idea.
So- only time will tell. Although, Mastodon has quite a following and has been holding steady so far.
I'm not on Facebook for a reason, I will never fed with meta.
I sorta wish we could subscribe to federation endpoints the way we do to magazines. Then it won't matter what is being federated overall. Hail the user, hail thyself!
Instances could do what Beehaw does and defed one direction but still allow their content to be seen by other instances. I think Meta could decide to defed and block that, if they wanted to, however. (Beehaw doesn't seem to care if other instances see their content as long as they can control posts/comments on their end, which doesn't bother me at all since it doesn't effect me in any way. And I still get more content!)
I need to spend some time playing with KBin I like the bit I was testing but being able to share wtih Lemmy is so awesome.
Hail the user, hail thyself!
Forgot I left those communities behind on Reddit. I hope there’s a new community here somewhere for anyone that needs it. 😈
Interesting, it was a variation of embrace, extend, extinguish, without the extend part.
In a way, I think it happened to the entire internet. Look at browsers today, web development (that one might be controversial, but I think big techs somewhat forced bloated frameworks to be the standard way to create websites), video streaming, etc.
No, extend is a major part of it. That's how they topple community projects. They extend in good faith at first to get everyone locked in, then they extend in nefarious ways to keep the community stuck playing catch-up. Once they've absorbed all the users from the community projects, they kill off back access leaving the community project crippled in users and lost in direction.
Trust me. Facebook will definitely add great things at first but their goal is to draw users out of the fediverse and into Facebook.
it's better to have a small place with nice people rather than a big place full of bad people
I hope the Fediverse chooses not to play the larger corpos game and minimizes their influence at all stages. I forget where I saw it posted but just like linux, the Fediverse doesn't need to rush success. It will be successful, because what large corporations offer as social media is dreadful. Sooner or later all of them force some form of poison pill through their platform. Your content doesn't need to be commodified into product. No one owns your content and no one should be able to push content/ ads on you that you do not approve of. We may need to pay a little something for this freedom, and that's cool. Free as in freedom & not as in beer. Long live the fediverse or what ever currently holds to those values.
Sure, and 2023 will finally be the year of Linux Desktop.
Great Article. Meta brings nothing I want to ever see. Dont federate with them.
I'd rather federate with Google plus. I need to get back in touch with my old circles. ;)
I'll never federate my instance at least
As opposed to many of you, I look forward to Meta joining up with ActivityPub. I've learned to embrace Eternal September; and have come to understand the debt I owe to it. Companies win, yes. I haven't used Google chat in years. I don't bother keeping a copy of Gaim/Pidgin on my PC because I don't want to bother talking with anyone in a Jabber chat (Yeah, yeah, it's XMPP now, I started when it was Jabber and I was on the mothership server). Everyone I need to talk to moved from GChat to Skype, and then at some point, from Skype to Discord. They never stopped at Jabber, Mumble, or other OSS options; though some joined me in passing through. As I've said, human nature is opposed to load-balancing. People want to be part of the largest possible community, at least at first.
I would love to have an easy way to talk to local friends again, and have a wide base of information to share with them. If this new system is easier to coordinate local groups with than Meetup is, I'll be joining and becoming a fairly active user. I might keep my Lemmy accounts, my Mastodon account, and my KBin account - just like I'm keeping my Reddit account now.
If servers want to defederate from Facebook, that's their loss.