I do think the fediverse is better than the corporate built alternatives but the more time I’ve spent here the less I believe that it is a great solution. People are the fundamental problem and people control every instance, moderate every community, and post every comment (excluding bots which are their own problem). The amount of infighting I’ve witnessed here over trivial bullshit is astounding. People are constantly calling for defederation over one offense or another. Much of it rivals Reddit in it’s pettiness.
It’s true that no single entity controls it all, and that is an improvement, but everything still gets fragmented so much that I don’t think I believe it can reasonably grow beyond what it is now. Not without running into variations of the same problems as the others at least.
I think the simple truth of the matter is that humans can’t help this kind of tribal behavior. We group ourselves together using all kinds of labels, some broad and some incredibly specific, but the end result is always the same. Those with the labels I gave myself which are most important to me are my friends and those without them are my enemy. Until that primal need to exclude others is gone, any communal space we create will devolve to the point that there are effectively multiple siloed echo chambers that rarely overlap.
That was more of a rant than I initially intended, but the point is that I don’t think the fediverse would have solved this problem. If a federated version of Instagram was the dominant service for that kind of activity then the No Kings account there would have been censored by many groups for many reasons. Enough so that I don’t know that the impact would be any different.
I do think the fediverse is better than the corporate built alternatives but the more time I’ve spent here the less I believe that it is a great solution. People are the fundamental problem and people control every instance, moderate every community, and post every comment (excluding bots which are their own problem). The amount of infighting I’ve witnessed here over trivial bullshit is astounding. People are constantly calling for defederation over one offense or another. Much of it rivals Reddit in it’s pettiness.
It’s true that no single entity controls it all, and that is an improvement, but everything still gets fragmented so much that I don’t think I believe it can reasonably grow beyond what it is now. Not without running into variations of the same problems as the others at least.
I think the simple truth of the matter is that humans can’t help this kind of tribal behavior. We group ourselves together using all kinds of labels, some broad and some incredibly specific, but the end result is always the same. Those with the labels I gave myself which are most important to me are my friends and those without them are my enemy. Until that primal need to exclude others is gone, any communal space we create will devolve to the point that there are effectively multiple siloed echo chambers that rarely overlap.
That was more of a rant than I initially intended, but the point is that I don’t think the fediverse would have solved this problem. If a federated version of Instagram was the dominant service for that kind of activity then the No Kings account there would have been censored by many groups for many reasons. Enough so that I don’t know that the impact would be any different.
I dont think the fediverse will be able to withstand a sophisticated threat in its current form.
Once the number of MAUs makes it worth manipulating, it will be impossible to manage.
There will be a few large well managed instances with no federation, and a disparate assortment of tiny instances with very limited federation.