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The Fediverse is in Danger
(mstdn.social)
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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2023
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While it's DEFINITELY not a bad idea to not put all eggs in one basket and prevent stuff from even happening in the first place, i think this person is worrying too much about the consequences. We do have a recent important precedent of a very public corporate takeover of a very popular free software service: The Freenode IRC takeover. After the nutcase effectively took over the network's ownership, people just... left. They remade the service elsewhere (Libera.Chat) and everybody moved, making the takeover meaningless. So, if worst comes to worst i don't think there's gonna be a problem. Here's the info on Wikipedia of the event and the exodus to Libera Chat
You paint a very rosy picture of the Freenode situation. As a result, many people moved to Discord (and to a lesser extend Matrix) and the significantly smaller libera.chat is still waaay to centralized as if people didn't learn anything from this disaster.
Also in the case of Freenode/libera.chat basically all the admins also switched, meaning little institutional knowledge was lost. This is mostly because the person who took Freenode over was indeed such a nut-case. In a typical corporate takeover the staff is (at least for a while) retained, meaning they can't just set up shop in a different place easily.
In addition, I'd reckon that at least part of this is due to the fact that IRC is somewhat centralized - to my knowledge (I only lived at the very tail end of the "popularity" of IRC) you couldn't really be on one server and chat in a room that was on another server, right? Technically the protocol did have the capability for multiple servers to communicate (such as what would occur with netsplits), but you didn't usually add someone's server to the network as far as I understand (unless that is just a trend I missed out on).
[The rest of this probably deserves to be its own parent comment, but I'll leave it as a reply here since it is partially relevant to the topic of IRC in this thread]
I'd think that at least systems like Mastodon, Matrix, and Lemmy have some resilience to this since they are very interoperable by their nature, but it'll still need a ton of work done in order to get there.
The biggest problem is not the technological aspect of these applications / The Fediverse, but the onboarding and "human element" to them. I operate my own Matrix, Mastodon, and now Lemmy instances but out of the three I feel like Matrix was the only one where I was able to "see the world" so to speak without any extra steps. With Mastodon I had to subscribe to a relay in order to receive posts from other instances, and for Lemmy... well I'm still working that one out and trying to figure out how it works (I see new posts to the communities I'm subscribed to, and will see that it says there are three comments as an example... but they're not visible?) - so I just don't see how others are going to be able to avoid joining massive instances since you don't have those issues there (or at least, to the same degree).
Basically any IRC client supports connecting to multiple servers simultaneously, so joining channels on multiple servers was never an issue. Also originally the "network" in IRC implied open federation just like you are describing, but over spam and moderation issues it evolved into a allow-list federation and ultimately incompatible s2s protocols. I sometimes wish people on the Fediverse would learn a bit more about the history of federated systems like IRC to avoid falling into the same traps ๐
As for your hidden comment number: there is currently a bug in Lemmy that shows message edits as new comments in the UI.
Ah, I see! I guess you truly do learn something new every day - I appreciate it!
I hope that we one day return to a world where everything is open and has less walled gardens, as it truly does pain me to know all of the capabilities we could have that are just intentionally always locked away ๐ฎโ๐จ
Dang TIL what happened to Freenode :/
It was definitely weird, the Wiki entry skips on some of the weirdest manic parts of it, like the dude claiming to be the "Crown Prince of Korea" and more weirdness, very much felt like a whole manic episode triggered this
It's not that simple. ActivityPub is at risk of centralization, just like email. There are no built-in protections against centralization or EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Furthermore, Mastodon makes it difficult to migrate accounts, especially from an instance that is unreachable or just disabled the export function.
Unfortunately locking users into a platform is extremely valuable because they can be shown ads, used for data mining, manipulation (like Cambridge Analytica). ActivityPub is not automatically immune to all of this.
The comparison with IRC is not very meaningful: moving from one server to another is much easier because IRC users don't lose followers, bookmarks, posts, etc.
How would a "built-in protection against centralization" even work?
IMHO, you can only provide tools. You can't prevent people from being stupid and not using them. That's also why by now, e.g. the EU tries to solve such problems through regulation.
The protocol could require "dual-homing" user accounts, where each account is automatically replicated on 2 different instances without need for hacks and workarounds. That would prevent users from losing their account if an instance is shut down, and also make it easy to migrate to a new instance without losing followers etc. The clients following your account always check for updates on both instances and if you move one of your accounts they update automatically.
(This would not create significant additional load on the network: your toots are already being replicated on all instances where you have followers.)
No, tools are rarely "neutral". They encourage or discourage workflows and behaviors.
The point is that IRC is normally used in a way that leaves more to the client. ActivityPub services usually expect that users put much more trust in the instances. It might be worth thinking about that.