this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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The beauty of the fediverse is that the last panel can't happen.
We control our own instances. There's no world where admins wouldn't defederate from any Facebook attempt to barge in.
Maybe a few larger instances sell out, but users hold the power here now. If an admin betrays our trust, we'll just make a new instance.
Even more than defederating, it's in the hands of users. If people were to flood in from somewhere with bad intentions, it would likely be from one or two servers. At that point, just block those servers/communities from your view and continue about your day
But what if those servers/instances are the ones which has quality communities in it and what if the users and owners of those communities refuse to migrate to new server/instance? Wouldn't that be the same case of reddit where the user base is split and the new migrated server/instance needs building again?
DING DING DING. Here's Facebook's playbook:
Best thing we can hope for is a competitor to appear or something and then have a very split fediverse between instances, hence you cannot defederate without causing major harm
Reminds me a bit of how to deal with gangrene. Chop the leg at the ankle or the knee, drastic as it is, is better than lose the entire leg from the waist down, maybe some jewels included.
This is absolutely a bad outcome and I hope the pact prevents this from playing out.
However, I feel kind of ok with losing the subset of users that would accept and use a Facebook implementation of the fediverse. It directly defeats the purpose, regardless of how much better the UI/UX may be, and shows they didn't understand it in the first place.
They could defederate servers that don’t do exactly what they want and servers that are defederated might capitulate. The last frame is very possible and we’ve already seen it start to happen with thedonald on shitjustworks.
Edit: that said, I know the Donald comes from Reddit so it’s not the best example. But it’s an example of the method by which the last panel could happen.
That's not really what happened here. It was 1 guy who made a community. That 1 guy was banned and his community was deleted for breaking the rules (specifically rule 2, no bigotry). Just before he got banned, people on other instances were freaking out like we just had the entire population of /r/the_donald join up here when it was 1 troll who broke our rules.
That same strategy can be used to police the fediverse. If policing is possible, then the last panel of the comic is possible.
ELI5 on thedonald please
It was a super bigoted alt-right subreddit that eventually got banned
Someone recreated it on sh.itjust.works and started posting garbage
The greater fediverse caught wind of it and called for sh.itjust.works to be defederated.
The sh.itjust.works admins got rid of TD (and the user, I believe)
I'm not sure, but I believe at least a couple of instances defederated sh.itjust.works for a bit before letting it back in once action was taken
Thanks!
In support of your statement, here's the Fedipact, signed by so many servers and communities across the Fediverse to not let Meta (or any other corpo, in that matter) to barge into the federation:
https://beach.city/@vantablack/110589010586936018